Dad's top, Mom's top

 About a month ago I unpacked and dismantled the only shirt of my father's I brought home with me. After it was "deboned", I made a very uncharacteristic decision: I'd make a quilt from it. Immediately. I wouldn't fold up all the pieces and stuff them into one of my shoeboxes of less-than-a-yard, fretting further down the line over whether the pieces cut from it were medium, light, dark, tan, brown, green, what-have-you. (I always fall into that trap, being swayed more by the 100% Cotton label than common sense.)

With limited yardage, I figured I'd treat the shirt as a novelty print (ideas for which I've been collecting for some time) and try to find something that would need large segments. That would eliminate yardage-loss-through-too-many-seam-allowances, and showcase the 'Hawaiian' flavor of the shirt fabric. The largest square I could get from the sleeves was 8". So the search began!

Roughly 8 patterns were selected and culled through, until this one stood alone:

I liked the idea of the large areas, but really hated the way the sashing broke the continuity of the lines. In fact, I saved it in my folder as "without sashing".

So I printed out this picture, cut out the sashing and taped the paper back together, then looked at it as a function of a large middle square (instead of the chisel shapes of the original pattern).

Essentially, it's squares and 4-patches set on point.

I had a golden tan/brown fabric that went beautifully with Dad's shirt,

and a grunge dark brown that picked up the dark accents,

but eventually I went with a light-light-light yellow (it would appear off-white, until it's placed next to off-white) from my mother's fabrics for the light large squares. I could get 7 squares from the light and 8 squares from the shirt. A plan was forming!

When it came to the half-4-patch setting triangles around the perimeter, I deliberately cut the small triangles so the hypotenuse was on the straight of grain. Mostly. There were 2 cut by force of habit and ended up with the legs on the straight of grain (the hypotenuse on the bias), but out of a possible 32 problematic edges, two wasn't so bad.

Several years ago I bought a bundle of pre-cut 1-yard batik fabrics on sale, various dye treatments of the same design. One of the "yards" had the same green/brown/dark colors as the shirt and was a natural choice for the border (the grunge, being auditioned above, was too dark). However, in order to make enough of a border to proportionately frame the inner pattern, it would take the full yard. The pieces I bought were 34-1/2" long, and that was just skimpy enough to scare me into setting this aside for a couple of weeks to think about things.

I already knew the gold/tan/brown fabric would have to be used as the corners of the border. Would there be enough of that to extend another inch beyond the corner, allowing me to eke out that batik successfully?

Nope.

After thinking on it, I opted to use another colorway of the batik bundle, one that pulled in the grays of the shirt. I'd make the extending pieces large enough to say "this is on purpose", but not so large as to pull visual weight from the main, brown batik border.

And this is the finished flimsy:

Roughly 48" x 68"

A close look at the corners:

I made sure to piece the batiks so the pattern flows the same direction going from brown to gray.

The grunge will be used as binding. I found a large piece of brushed cotton (almost a flannel) from my mother's fabric, and that'll be the backing. It's teal, but it's big enough, so it's perfect.

I'm making this for my mother's new room in her next Memory Care facility. I'll be moving her in at the end of this month (it's only a couple of miles from me).

These also progressed as my Leader-Enders. I see the mistake. It's been fixed.