While Shannon Downey combed through estate sale treasures in early September, she came across a beautiful embroidery project: a map of the United States. It showed the outline of the nation, surrounded by each state’s flower — from Utah’s sego lily to Louisiana’s magnolia.
Downey snatched it up for just $5, but when she walked into another room at this sale, she found a box full of fabric. The embroidery project wasn’t finished.
Downey realized, as she later tweeted, that it was “a massive quilting project that was just begun.” She knew that, as an avid embroiderer, she would have to buy and finish the quilt. But she couldn’t do it alone.
So, Downey took to social media to ask for help. She explained that the unfinished project, from an estate sale northeast of Chicago, had been started by Rita Smith, a nurse and sewing enthusiast who had just begun the project before she died at age 99.
Downey’s post gathered more than 1,000 volunteers throughout the U.S. in a single day. Downey couldn’t involve everyone, but in the end, more than 150 people helped her finish “Rita’s Quilt.” Downey mailed 100 individual hexagons to volunteers, who stitched them with a state or a star, and when the pieces returned, others helped sew them all together.
“Folks were enthusiastically imploring that I select them,” Downey explained over email. “I couldn’t keep up with it!”
One thing worried Downey, though. How would Smith feel about her quilt being completed by strangers? Smith’s son chimed in to say his mother would have been honored. “That was a huge relief for me,” Downey said.
The completed quilt will make its debut at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky. Downey and many of the volunteers — she calls them “stitchers” — will attend an opening event in March, and it will remain there until May.
“After that,” Downey said, “it will be going on a cross country art and community building tour with me. I plan to bring it to all of the stitchers who worked on it so they can show it off to their community.”
