La Bella Familia is finally finished and sent off. This piece took me longer to make than any other quilt I have ever done. And it wasn't because of technical difficulties or the fact that it is over 9 feet square. I have made other quilts as big or bigger in a quarter of the time (Conversation and Le'ia). It was a conceptual problem.

I have said before that the quilt knows what it wants to be, and I believe that La Bella Familia knew what it was supposed to be......it just took a lot of fits and starts for me to figure it out. It started out as a quilt for a little family made up of a single mother and her daughters, and ended up as a quilt for a big family made up of a mother and her daughters, a father and his sons, and the twins that belonged to everyone. And over the course of the four years that this transition took the concept of the quilt kept shifting, and then reshifting in order to encompass what was going on in their lives.

The idea of the sunflowers was based on the mother and her daughters. They are exuberant, intelligent, dynamic blondes and sunflowers were the only flower that could capture the energy that this group of females contain. The pillows that I usually work up prior to a quilt came in handy in this situation, since I had the sunflower image but no overall design for the quilt itself. So I worked out the technical aspects on the pillows....how to dye and stitch, what background colors to use, full faced sunflowers or sunflowers in side view. But the idea of the family of flowers behind and coming through a frame didn't come to me until I learned that the couple were expecting twins. Once I learned that the design, dyeing and basting out for the appique happened rapidly in a couple of weeks. I was so happy for them as I stitched on the quilt top through the fall and the early winter of that year as it seemed like the whole world waited for the birth of two lovely baby girls.

And then three months later I learned that one of the girls had quite suddenly died without any warning or apparent cause. The death of a baby is such a tragedy, so non-negotiable and so unacceptable that there is no way to get your mind around it. I brought the completed quilt top with me and went to where the family was to make myself available to them for whatever I could do. We looked at the quilt top during that time and the girls, their mother and their father showed me which of the flowers was the baby Bella who had died.

I returned home to begin the quilting phase, and used a clear light yellow to do the stitching for Bella's flower and the "energy lines" of wave quilting around her flower. I used a warm red brown thread for everything else. But the quilting phase took much longer than usual for me. I struggled to find time to work on it, whereas usually I have to be dragged off a quilt in order to cook, eat, wash and sleep. It wasn't until over a year later, when I attended Bella's memorial service, that I realized that I had been making a quilt for an individual, the mother of the family, when the quilt wanted to be for the family.....Bella's family. This family has become stronger and stronger in their love and their commitment to each other over the time that I have known them.

In Italian La Bella Familia translates as The Beautiful Family or The Good Family. And, of course, in our case it also means Bella's Family.