Quilt Lessons for Life

I recently put up a post about the making of a t-shirt quilt. Today I delivered the one I was working on when I published that post. It came from t-shirts from the family camp held at Maine's Winona Camps after its summer camp ends. The client wanted it to take to camp for the bed in their cabin. The mood of this quilt was quite different from what I usually do, but then I wasn't making this for me. Don't they say that the customer, or, here, client is always right. She wanted the shirts to be set on a burgundy, one of the camp's colors, background, and she wanted it to be around full- or double-bed size. Since I only had nine shirts with which to work, that meant lots of "empty" background space. It was a bit disconcerting at first, but by the time I had finished the quilting and was adding the binding around the edges, it hit me how perfectly suited this would be for use in a cabin. What do you think?

If you know me and my quilting, you know that this is a departure from what I usually do. I usually don't think in monochromatic terms, nor do I usually include large areas of "empty," but those are what makes this quilt really work. Different can work, and it sometimes may be the only thing that works. I try to learn something with each quilt I make, and the lesson here is to trust someone else's instinct because, yes, the customer is always right.