Lawrence quilter Mary Boucher is pictured before a quilt she made, depicting the Watkins Museum of History on Nov. 22, 2016, w, 1047. The quilt, which is currently on display at the museum, 1047 Massachusetts, will be raffled and donations will benefit the museum.

Mary Boucher can trace her fascination with Lawrence history back to the year she settled here, 1975.

It was, coincidentally, the very same year that the Watkins Museum of History — the old building at 1047 Massachusetts St. used to house a bank and mortgage company owned by the storied Watkins family — opened its renovated doors to the community. The three-story structure, constructed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style some 130 years ago, is one of Boucher’s architectural favorites in town.

Now, four decades after her love affair with the building — and with the relics of Lawrence history hidden inside its walls — began, Boucher is paying tribute to the Watkins Museum in the best way she knows how, with a bit of needle and thread.

A new quilt created by Boucher depicting the building’s red-brick exterior now hangs from the walls of the museum’s third floor and, next month, will be given away in a raffle drawing to benefit the Watkins Museum.

“I’ve wanted to do something for Watkins for years, and since I turned 70 this year, I just thought, ‘It’s now or never,'” said Boucher, a longtime seamstress and member of the Kaw Valley Quilters Guild.

Boucher, who also helped craft a 76-inch quilt in honor of Lawrence’s 150th anniversary in 2004, began work on the Watkins project this past summer. The 48-by-52-inch quilt took three months and 1,470 yards of multicolored thread to complete, said Boucher, who first approached Watkins executive director Steve Nowak with the idea (the two attend church together) earlier this year.

He said yes, and Boucher got to work, first by studying pictures of the building provided by Nowak as well as her own snapshots. She then created a pattern based on these images, and labored, quite diligently at times, to find the right materials for the job.

“The profile is just so distinctive,” Boucher said of the museum, which she depicts from a street view looking toward the building’s arched entryway and steep gabled roof. “You see so many pictures and it just pops off the background, and I was fortunate enough to find a sky color that I felt really enhanced the roof color to where it stands out really nicely against that.”

Another challenge? Finding just the right shade of red to match the Watkins’ brick exterior.

“My husband and I went to every fabric store in Kansas and Missouri both,” she recalled with a laugh.

Actually piecing the quilt together, Boucher said, started from the top down. First, she laid out the sky section, moving then to the roof and the building’s architectural flourishes and finally to the trees planted along the sidewalk and the neighboring Japanese Friendship Garden, using the raw-edge applique technique throughout.

She’s pleased with the results, and, as a longtime friend of the Watkins Museum, hopes to generate a lot of money for the historic building when her quilt is raffled off Dec. 3. The winning raffle ticket will be drawn that day during the museum’s Tails and Traditions Family Festival, slated for 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Those interested can purchase tickets for $5 each (or $20 for five) in person at the museum’s front desk, over the phone at 841-4109 or online at www.watkinsmuseum.org.

In the meantime, happy with her Watkins Museum quilt, Boucher said she’d like to tackle the other items on her Lawrence architectural bucket list. Among her picks: the Union Pacific Depot, the courthouse, maybe the Ninth Street Missionary Baptist Church.

But first, there’s an old barn outside of town that she’s got her eye on.

The Watkins Museum, Boucher said, was a challenge. As someone with a tendency of doing “everything by the seat of my pants,” she said, she wasn’t sure how the quilt might turn out.

Originally, she’d chosen the wood-grained border fabric as a nod to a picture frame. The museum’s interpretation, though, suggested that the fabric in a way mimicked the curly yellow pine woodwork of the building’s third floor.

And that works, too, Boucher said.

“I’m pleasantly surprised,” she said of the quilt. “I hoped I could do it. I wanted to do justice to the building.”