Memory Quilt

Joan made a memory quilt from outfits too cute to throw away. The clothing from onsies, t-shirts, play clothes, and pajamas worn by her twin granddauthers, Abigail and Samantha, make a fabulous memory quilt. Joan plans to give the quilt to her daughter later this summer as a birthday gift.

Most of the fabrics were cotton knits, so Joan stabilized the fabric with iron-on interfacting prior to cutting the squares. She cut 5″ squares from the smaller outfits like onsies, made Four Patches, and then trimmed them to match the size of the larger squares. She wrote, “Somehow I had the exact number I needed.” The narrow navy solid sashing frames all the prints superbly.

I chose a medium blue thread to blend with the blue backing fabrics. It mimics gray in the various prints on the front of the quilt. Joan figured a freehand design would allow me to work around the 3-D aspects of some of the fabrics, and we opted for a meander and heart design.

What an awesome keepsake of your granddaughters’ clothing, Joan! Thanks for sharing your design idea with blog readers.

T-Shirt Quilts

My friend and customer, Linda, sent me two quilt tops made from T-shirts to longarm for her. Her friend asked her to make them as a gift for an athletic daughter. In addition to giving permission to share them on the blog, Linda wrote her thoughts and tips about using T-shirts to make quilts.

The idea book Linda used was T-shirt Quilts Made Easy by Martha Deleonardis. “In her book, Martha describes the Grid Method quilts. All of my T-shirts had 12 inch prints. After stabilizing the T-shirts with a non-woven fusible interfacing (I used Pellon 911FW) so the T-shirts would not stretch when sewn, I cut each T-shirt print to 12.5 inches square.  I used the grid size of 4 inches for the template of the quilt design and surrounded each T-shirt with 4 inch (4.5 unfinished) squares of beautiful purple/blue batik fabric. I collected approximately 24 different batiks for this project. I wanted to infuse a different size print into the quilt design since just having 12 inch prints was rather boring. I decided to cut out the small logos that some of the T-shirts had. I cut them to 4.5 inches square and wanted to sew 3 together vertically to sew in between each 12″ T-shirt square. Since I did not have enough small logos, I inserted a baseball print in the middle of each one. As a result, this created a much more interesting T-shirt quilt design.”

Linda created a second T-shirt quilt using the Twistin’ Fun method as explained in Martha’s book. Tilting the blocks adds visual interest to the quilt, don’t you think? Linda embroidered a square with the quilt recipient’s name and graduation details. (Click on the picture to zoom in.) Both of these T-shirt quilts will call up fun memories for years to come!

Have you made a T-shirt quilt, or is there one on your quilting horizon?