It started with a newspaper. In 1993, Sandy Schweitzer  of Crystal Lake, Illinois, was reading columns by Bob Greene in the Chicago Tribune that talked about dozens of children being killed in the Chicago area that year. Their photographs were often run on the front page. It was heart-wrenching.

“I had always been interested in the textile arts, but I started quilting in 1994 and I was doing traditional quilting,” Schweitzer said. “But with this recurring story, I was just incensed, and I wanted some way to memorialize these children so they wouldn’t be forgotten. I remember thinking, ‘I have to do something so they will not be forgotten.’”

So, Schweitzer got to work. The quilt features a woman’s figure behind 61 blank squares, where the children’s ages and how they died are inked. The woman’s face and hands are striped with different colors and shades — “how do you portray a weeping woman, and it has to represent every age, every race, every culture, everyone? That was the idea behind the strip piecing of the face with the different colors. She’s universal,” Schweitzer said.

The woman is weeping blood.

At one point, the Chicago Tribune ran the faces of all the children in rows across the page, which was Schweitzer’s inspiration for the rows and the use of the tumbling block for the design of the quilt. Originally, she had photo-transferred the children’s photos onto cotton cloth and was planning to include their images in the quilt. But after learning about issues of copyright infringement, she realized that if she ever wanted to show the quilt, she would have to find a way to represent the children without using their photographs.

“I had to cover their faces. That was just anguish. That just felt like I was diminishing them, putting another end to their life,” Schweitzer said. “My daughter, who I love dearly, had a pair of old white jeans that were really soft and well-worn and that’s what I used to cover up their faces and then I inked their ages and how they were killed. Actually, it’s a much stronger statement.”

Schweitzer said that when she brought the finished piece of quilt shows, she often had mixed reactions.

“There were people who would be standing in front of the quilt and crying and people who would be angry, which is fine because that’s what art is supposed to do,” Schweitzer said. “When you think about art, you think about how it’s supposed to evoke emotion, and I think this [quilt] does.”

Schweitzer said her black and white cat, Murphy, was very attached to the quilt and would do anything in order to sit down on the piece when it was in progress. He was there as Schweitzer and her daughter, Beth, who did the lettering, worked on the quilt together.

“We talked together about these kids,” Schweitzer said. “What they had been through, why they had to go through it.”

The quilt is a piece of social commentary, Schweitzer said. It’s “a more in-your-face” way of telling a story, but every quilt contains its own story in some way.

“I am a certified quilt appraiser with the American Quilter’s Society and I get the opportunity to see hundreds of quilts. I think every single one of them has a story,” Schweitzer said. “You don’t spend that kind of time making a quilt and not thinking about what you’re doing, why you’re making it, what it means. Those are just things you think about while you’re working and they contribute to the story, too.”