The Ties Between a Daddy and His Daughter

A friend of my parents, Norm Eisner, passed away a little over a year ago.  A few months back, his daughter Cheri asked if I would make a quilt out of some ties she had that belonged to him.

They were special to her because they were his, but had additional meaning because he was the manager of a clothing store called Langley's, and Cheri's first job was working in the store with him.

I agreed, and she sent me the ties. There were 24 of them, and all but a couple were made of silk. This meant that I would have to use a stabilizer to make those easier to work with.

Cheri and I went back and forth on possible designs. But we were constrained by several factors:
a) She wanted the finished quilt to be about 5.5 feet on each side (a fairly large wall hanging!)
b) The relatively small number of ties (and the amount of usable fabric from each), meant that some patterns would not work (although she was OK with using additional fabric if necessary)
c) Norm apparently had a fondness for darks (mostly blues and reds) in his tie palette. So there was not a lot of variety in the fabric values. We wanted the ties to be the focus, so again, this limited the design options.

I finally settled on a basic square-and-sash pattern. But I wanted to do something to reinforce the whole notion of ties and men's clothing.  So I was actually able to find the perfect fabric for the sashing and borders: it is a charcoal with dark gray pinstripes....exactly like a man's suit material! In fact, the pattern is actually called "Man About Town"! Careful planning and cutting ensured that in all the sashing and borders, the stripes were consistently vertical.

Since the overall impression of the top is "dark", I wanted to add a highlight in the inner border. So I chose a white print fabric that one might find in a man's dress shirt.

Shirt, suit, and ties. All ready to step out!

As I mentioned above, Cheri's dad used to work at a store called Langley's. And they actually had their own line of clothes, including, of course, ties. So she requested that I include one of the back-of-the-tie-loops of fabric on the front as another homage. There it is at the bottom center.

Since the quilt is on the large size, and because I have recently taught a class on "quilting in sections", this was a good project to do using that technique. Notice that it is 9 blocks wide by 10 tall. So I made it in two sections of 9 x 5 each.

The quilting is good old ditch, using black thread.

And the name: chosen by Cheri of course! How perfect is that!!!