The joy of finishing Rita’s quilt.

It starts with one stitch, by one woman. A pattern she’s ordered from the back of a magazine, created for the 1976 US bicentennial celebration. A quilt featuring a hexagon for every state in the US, with its state outline, state flower, and state bird part of the design, along with 50 stars.

She will set it down again. But the next person to pick up Rita Smith’s meticulously prepared project, bundled together in a Tupperware box, will be a stranger, some decades later. Shannon Downey will find it at an estate sale in a home in Mount Prospect, Illinois, after Rita’s death at the age of 99.

“There was a vintage embroidery hoop - they don’t make them like that any more. Then I noticed there was a picture inside it - the outline of New Jersey. I went through the [container], and realised ‘this is a project’”. 

Rita had prepared the hexagons by cutting up pieces of bedsheet and transferring designs on them, ready to be embroidered, but had only stitched two of the states. She had started on a third.

A school nurse, Rita may have started on the quilt 20 or even 30 years ago, believes Bill, one of her sons.

He told Shannon that the project was then probably abandoned several years ago when his father became seriously ill and she began caring for him.

Shannon, who uses craft to promote social and political activism, always tries to complete unfinished projects she comes across which have been started by someone who has died. “I feel like I’m doing something to make sure their soul is resting,” she says.

But on this occasion the project was far too big for her to manage alone.  

She asked for help on Instagram. What happened next took her by surprise. Within 24 hours more than 1,000 volunteers came forward, far more than she needed. She chose 100 embroiderers living all over the US to sew the hexagons - some wanted to represent their own state, others just wanted to be part of the enormous endeavour. Some 30 women, mostly local to Chicago, then gathered for the sewing together of the hexagons to make the quilt. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/pGHxCgI6yx/ritas-quilt