HST quilt for a kidney donor - my mom

I'm finally getting around to blogging about a special surprise quilt that I made over the holidays!

For the past several years, my mom's husband has been dealing with declining kidney function. The doctors had been keeping an eye on it for some time, but unfortunately there isn't much that can be done for people whose kidneys are failing, apart from dialysis or kidney donation.

Long story short, he eventually got to the point that he needed a kidney transplant, and upon investigation, they learned that my mom was a match and could donate one of hers. The transplant was a few weeks before Christmas, and things are going well for both patients! But going into it, my mom (who’d never had surgery before and had never even spent a night in the hospital apart from when my sister and I were born) had a request. "Could you please bring me a quilt?" she asked. "Just any quilt you have sitting around will be fine."

I don't know, it didn't feel right to bring her just ANY old quilt. 😂 I felt like this was an occasion that called for one made especially for her! So I got out my bundle of Essex Yarn-Dyed Linen (the Pond color coordinates), and this was what came out of it. The background is all Kona Snow and Kona Ivory.

After years of working in bright colors, I'm really feeling the softer, more subdued neutrals in this quilt! Some of the Essex Linen I used was the metallic linen, which has a little bit of a sparkle to it, so that jazzed things up in a really good way. I love how it all turned out.

I played around with the color placement a lot on this quilt. I liked the idea of not making it a straight graduation of color—I threw in some of the neutral half-square triangles at strategic spots in order to give the design a little more depth. (Also making it a little trippier for when she was on pain meds! lol)

As you can see, the entire quilt is made out of 4" half-square triangles, set on point. Making all those HSTs actually wasn't AS painful as it could have been—I made some templates for fast HST stitching that worked great! No marking diagonal lines on the backs of the squares and no squaring up afterwards. In fact, my next project is to make a PDF with the templates I used, for any of you who are interested in making HSTs the same way.

Here are the blocks, slowly coming together on my design wall. I was working from a digital mock-up that was on my computer screen. This quilt took major forethought and planning to put it together correctly!

I finished it off with my go-to quilting method recently: Straight diagonal lines about an inch apart. I'm loving straight-line quilting lately! I use masking tape to mark off the first line somewhere close to the center of the quilt, then just set the quilting guide on my Bernina 770 and go. As a bonus, because the blocks were on point, the seam lines on this quilt helped guide me and keep me from getting off track as I worked my way along.

My mom is now enjoying this quilt as she and her husband make their recoveries. I’m happy to report that both of them are doing very well!