Washington: The Patchwork Memorial

The Patchwork Memorial

What began as a modest remembrance of a few who succumbed to AIDS has become one of the nation's most moving memorials. This weekend in Washington, a quilt the size of nearly eight football fields and weighing 16 tons will be unfurled on the Ellipse near the White House. A four-month-long, 20-city tour by the San Francisco-based NAMES Project, which thought up the idea, has swelled the number of the quilt's 3-ft. by 6-ft. panels from 2,000 to 8,288. Each panel, produced by friends and relatives, commemorates a single life lost to AIDS; stitched together is everything from ashes, photographs and...

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