Thursday, January 2, 2014

T-shirt Memory Quilt #2

When I made my last t-shirt quilt, I did not know that the recipient would love it so much. It was very surprising and made me so happy to know that she loves it like she does.

With her enjoyment of this quilt, she has suggested me to several people who have asked about t-shirt quilts, and this has led to me making another t-shirt quilt.

I was contacted and asked to make a quilt using not only t-shirts but hospital gowns. The lady who contacted me had recently lost her grandfather, and he was often in hospital gowns toward the end of his life, so they naturally wanted to include them.  She wanted this quilt made for her grandmother. She asked me to make it for Christmas. Since I get a, usually a two week, winter break from work, I thought I could get it completed in two weeks. I decided to go ahead and make the quilt for this family. We met and I started the quilt.

Their Christmas was moved up by four days and she asked if I could get it finished in time. I did my absolute best and finished this quilt in record time: ten days!

I stayed up late one night and quilted most of it. The next morning I finished quilting and put the binding on it just a couple of hours before their Christmas.

She thanked me and told me that her grandmother loved the quilt and that she cried and stroked it. That, to me, is the best thing a person could say about a quilt.

 
This is one of two pictures I took. I took it to help me keep the pieces in place as I sewed the top together. When I sew I move all of the pieces around and sometimes they get sewn together differently from what I intended, but I have found that if I take a picture and keep a copy (digital or paper) beside my sewing machine it does not get rearranged as I sew.
 
Although this quilt came together in ten days, it is surprisingly my best technical pieced and quilted quilt. A majority of the pieces lined up perfectly and the sparse stitch-in-the-ditch had only a couple of puckers. In the past I would not cross the stitching choosing instead to go in one direction to avoid the dreaded pucker. The quilting was almost perfect in this account. I wish I had had just a little more time to quilt a little more on it.
 
The backing is a blue on blue gingham with a small piece of Atlanta Braves fabric since the grandfather was such a big Braves fan, and the binding was a navy and white stripe. This quilt was almost perfectly square. The Braves fabric is quite hard to find and I bought the small piece the day after I picked up the shirts and gowns. I also purchased the binding and backing fabric the night after so that I could start quilting as soon as it was pieced. That makes things go much faster.
 
I finished this quilt before my winter break, which was fine because it gave me time to finish a couple of other quilts.
 
Whew, this has been a long post.


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