T-Shirt Quilts and all sorts of other things...........

One Saturday morning several months ago I got a call from a nice lady who wanted to know how much I might charge her for quilting a t-shirt quilt. It is always hard to quote over the phone without seeing the quilt and without knowing how densely quilted the person would want it done. This nice lady explained to me that she had never quilted before and this would be her first quilt. Oh........and she was on her way to the class to learn how to do it! I've got to tell you that I was pretty scared! T-shirt quilts can really take on a life of their own and be incredibly hard to work with. So I gave her a ball park estimate and figured that I would never hear from her again.



WELL! Was I ever wrong! I got a call from her the very next evening! She was almost finished piecing her top and wanted to get some tips about making the back and when could she bring it over to be quilted? I gotta tell you..............I was really impressed.


To make a long story abit shorter I'll just tell you that she claimed not to be a quilter and professed that at her age (71) she probably wouldn't do another quilt............I told her that unfortunately she had already been bitten by the quilting bug and she would be making more.... I was sure of it.


The picture below is of her 2nd t-shirt quilt. I just finished the quilting on it this morning.

THIS QUILT IS GINORMOUS! I couldn't even get the whole thing on my design wall!





T-shirt quilts are So very interesting. I just love looking at all of the neat shirts. What a great way to remember fun times.




This quilt was originally sent to someone to make the t-shirt quilt and unfortunately when it was given back it was already cut into small chunks. The picture below shows a really good way to handle those little little logos that appear on the front of shirts.












Since this quilt is a gift for her daughter she included an outfit that was bought on her honeymoon in San Diego. This square includes both the TOP and the BOTTOM of that outfit.








When doing the quilting I tried to include leafy designs since the recipient of this quilt has decorated her home using leafy type patterns.










So that is not all I did today!


I also finished a baby quilt top!

It's kinda hard to see on this picture, but the quilting pattern I used was from Deloa Jones' Continuous Curve quilting book. It makes a nice pattern on the back.

Let's see, I also did 3 loads of laundry today, cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, returned books to the library, picked up a class catalog at the local community center, did some shopping and looking for new chairs for the living room, had lunch with a good friend and lastly went to the dermatologist who promptly used her bottle to burn off 4 pre-cancerous spots on my face and 4 spots on my arms! Gotta always remember to put sunscreen on..........Especially living in Arizona!

Happy Anniversary!

Today is Mike and I's 29th wedding anniversary!

I don't think we are going to be doing anything special

besides perhaps going out for a nice dinner later on tonight.

We have SOOOOOOOOOOOOOooo many projects to work on at the house,

so I think that most of the day will be spent working on

taming some of the chaos within these walls!

I spent the morning doing a little embroidery on my new sewing machine

AND finishing up a project that I started over a year ago!

As you can see in the pictures below I made a label for the engagement quilt

that I made for Jenny and Rafael.

Since they are getting married in under 80 days now

I figured that I really should finish up the Engagement quilt!

As you can also see in the picture I have a one dollar bill with the label. This is an old custom. Early quilters used to sew a coin into the corner of thier quilts.

It was thought that this would bring wealth to the person who received the quilt.

Or........that they would never be broke since the coin was sewn into the layers of the quilt.

Usually I would sew a coin into the layers,

but I forgot until my daughter

reminded me about this.

I had sewn a coin from the year 2000 into my Millenium quilt

but unfortunately the coin was fairly heavy and it made a hole

in the fabric of the back of the quilt and worked its way out.

So this time I decided to sew a dollar bill under the label.

Hopefully I'll have better luck with that!

I did a little research online this morning and could not find any written evidence of this custom. However I did find a really neat Quilt History site. This site is chocked full of articles about the rich custom and folklore of quilting. Check it out here:

http://www.quilthistory.com/articles.htm