The creation of a quilt
I like quilting. I like choosing colors. I choose...different...colors. (Ask my friends. In a quilt shop they give me strange looks!) I like piecing, I like putting a quilt top together, I like changing things. (When I get a pattern, it never looks like the quilt of the cover. When it does, I am disappointed.) I sort of like the quilting, I like binding because it means I am done!So, when a friend asked me to make a t-shirt quilt to commemorate her son's first year, the directions were: not square. (plus a few other details, not pertinent here.) This should be perfect, right?
Except I had never done it before. So, I did what I do best: procrastinate.
4 months later, I decided to get started. I googled t-shirt quilt images, and got a lot of quilts put together as...squares. Except for one: it had a silhouette of a giraffe in the background. It got me thinking...could I do a silhouette of a mother and child? The ultimate answer was no, I don't have the skills. But the blocks, while rectangular, were placed randomly around the quilt.
The next month, the local quilt guild offered a workshop on t-shirt quilts. So I put it on my calendar and forgot to go.
But I finally got started. I cut the t-shirts up, ironed them onto stabilizer (the wrong one, as it turned out) and cut them into shapes. None of them were square, although several were rectangular.
Disaster struck: I trimmed two blocks at the same time. The one underneath had some letters cut off. A google search showed the same wording ("Daddy and I agree, Mommy is the boss") is available on any number of shirts, but not (OF COURSE) the one I had. A conversation with my friend revealed that yes, this is a Very Important Shirt, and so I repaired it by zigzagging the pieces together with invisible thread. And plowed on, being more careful.
I sewed random pieces of fabric on the blocks to make them square, laid them out, sewed more fabric, trimmed more fabric, resewed, trimmed, and finally got the quilt together. So of the pieces ended up about 6 inches by 1/4 to 1/2 inches...should I plan better? Or take it as a design feature? It took me about a month once I got started. I am really proud of the fact that the one that says "Caution: may cause sleepless nights" is not only not square, but not straight either. That and "Center of Mom's universe" is in the middle, although not the exact center.
I asked for a bible verse to put on it, and was given Psalm 27:14: "Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord." I printed this onto t-shirt fabric and added it to the quilt. I almost printed Proverbs 27:14, which read "A cheery greeting shouted too early in the morning is counted as a curse." While this is an accurate description of life with a toddler, I decided not to add it also.
I had been given a couple of plaid shirts, and cut them up into 2 inch squares for a border...then realized that neither dimension of the quilt was a multiple of 1.5. So the border has blue fabric around two corners...adding to the random quality of the quilt.
Anyway, it was quilted, bound and shipped.
Pictures were taken...and are Some Where on my Computer.. So this picture is courtesy of the recipients.
The next t-shirt quilt is going to be machine appliqued on top of one piece of fabric.
Oh, and that procrastinating bit? I started this post 3 months ago.
posted by Marion @ 10:25 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home