Wednesday, May 12, 2010

I finally remembered to make my Alzheimer's quilt

I absolutely love it when an idea takes fruition and results in a finished product all in one day.  Nimble Fingers Quilt Guild in Potomac, MD is collecting Alzheimer's quilts.  Here's my finished 9"x12" quilt:

Here's how the creative process went:  I went to Wikipedia and found some text on Alzheimer's symptoms and copied and pasted that text into Word.   Then I went to google and searched for "word cloud".  A word cloud is a program that takes some text and represents that text in a picture.  The more a word is used the larger it appears in the word cloud.  I found ABCya! word clouds  and pasted the text into the program.   The word "SUCH" turned out to be the most used word.   So, I went back to Word and deleted all the SUCH's and added some "Alzheimer" here and there.  Since I decided to use the Word cloud on an elephant, I selected a grey pallet.  After I saved the word cloud, I printed it out on fabric.  The next step was to google "royalty free elephant clip art" where I found a coloring page with the outline of the elephant.  I brought the coloring page into my graphics program, sized it to 8x10, and printed it out on paper. 

In my quilt cave, I traced the elephant onto a fusible and ironed it onto the back of the word cloud fabric, cut it out, and ironed it onto the background.  A little satin stitching and binding completed the quilt.  This little quilt was fast, fun, easy, and creatively satisfying.  Woohoo!


3 comments:

  1. Very Clever!!! And Very Cute!

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  2. What an awesome quilt! I'm one of the lucky ones that gets to see it in person! Thank you so much for making this quilt for the AAQI, Linda. It's fabulous!
    Ami Simms

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