Making a Memory Quilt For Alzheimers' Patient

Making a memory quilt for a Alzheimer's patient, can be fun and very rewarding. My mother-in-law Peggy was diagnosed with this hateful disease in 1997. The idea for a memory quilt came to me after I had made my mom a family quilt for mother's day one year. It is a quilt with photographs of the patients loved ones on it. The reasoning behind the quilt is very simple: to keep them grounded in this time to the family. When someone is afflicted with Alzheimer's' they lose their latest memories first and keep their oldest memories the longest. So they may not recall where they parked the car, or what they had for dinner, but they remember things that happened along time ago with such clarity, that it is at times, very intimidating.

I decided on using 35 pictures for Peggy's memory quilt. I chose pictures that showed her children at different stages of their lives. As well as pictures showing her and her husbands age regression. Her favorite color is blue, so I chose a dark blue with a light blue design, and a light blue with a dark blue design for the blocks. One thing to keep in mind when doing one for a person with Alzheimer's' is to try and keep the material fairly plain or quiet. When using a material that is very busy or loud, it just adds to their overall confusion. Something you definitely do not want.

I scanned the photos and then printed them onto photo transfer sheets. I ironed the transfer on to a piece of white material that was just a little bit larger than the picture. The white square and photo was sewn on top of one of the 12" blue squares. I then added eyelet trim and blue ribbon around each photo. Putting dark blue ribbon on a light blue square, and light blue ribbon on a dark blue square.

I then sewed all the squares together, in an alternating pattern. I now had the quilt top. I used soft fleece for the backing and put a piece of quilt batting in between the two. I found that if you spray an adhesive on the quilt batting it helped to keep the pieces from shifting too much. After pinning the quilt, I sewed a dark blue blanket binding around the outside edge. All that was left was to tie it. I used 6 strand embroidery floss, and hand knotted every corner except the corners at the blanket binding.

When I gave her the memory quilt, she didn't quite know what to do with it. She would sit and touch the pictures for hours at a time. She is now in the final stages of Alzheimer's' and we have hung it up on the wall next to her bed. She stares and talks to that quilt every day. Of course you can't understand what she says all the time, but that's OK. I know she is still enjoying it, and that's what counts...her enjoyment.