Troubled Water Log Cabin Quilt

I pieced this quilt in the spring and left it with my mother for quilting. I was really on the fence about whether it worked or not--it has a very different palette of whites, cool pale blues, grays, and some bits of yellow. I was thinking about a windy lake, with whitecaps, when I chose my fabrics.

I used some blocks of vivid yellow in the border, cut from my precious half-yard of Owl and the Pussycat fabric from Purl Soho. There are tiny boats on them.

My mother backed it with a soft yellow and then went to work quilting it. Then she had a major (but for her, routine) back surgery while we were gone to Germany. For two days her recovery was normal, then her heart and lungs began to shut down. When we landed in the States the message on our phone was that she might not live. For a week she was on a ventilator. Saturday she came off the vent and now she is breathing on her own with just a little supplemental oxygen.

Tomorrow she will get out of surgical ICU, and I hope she'll be recuperating at my house in a week. 

I could never sell this quilt. I've named it Troubled Water, and it's a gift to my oldest sister who flew in from New York when things got bad, and spent the week, along with my stepfather, sitting with my mother in ICU. Terry, IOU.