Go Big Blue

This is the second quilt I gave away at Christmas. It was a lot less time in the making, admittedly, but also a lot less time in the planning. In our family we draw names for Christmas so the adults buy only one present each for one other adult. For Christmas 2010, the name I had drawn was Jeremiah, my nephew by marriage, my niece Sarah's husband.

Though I had had his name for a some time, it had taken me a little while to decide what I wanted to give him. Unfortunately, we don't get to hang out with Sarah and Jeremiah all that much, so I wasn't really sure what he might like. When I thought about making him this throw, I also had to double check to make sure he really is a True Blue fan. Jeremiah graduated from and played football for Georgetown College, in Georgetown, KY, which is just outside Lexington.

Everybody who knows me is well aware that I am not into sports. But where I live now is absolutely True Blue country so one has to be fairly dim-witted not to be aware of the UK Wildcats and how important they are to most people around here. By the same token, of course, around Louisville, another Kentucky team - I think they like the color red? - seems to be favored, and one can always find people anywhere with allegiances to teams other than the home team. So the last thing I wanted to do was make a Christmas present for Jeremiah which would offend him! But Sarah assured me that Jeremiah is a Wildcat follower at heart so I set to work.
For one side I bought as many different UK prints as I could find and just pieced big chunks of them together, adding, of course, a nice zebra in the middle. To make the throw nice, warm and cuddly, I put a big fleece on the back. Originally, I wasn't even going to put batting in the middle, but then it occurred to me that I might as well do so and make it a REAL quilt, since it would not be any more trouble to do so and the throw would be nicer and warmer if I did. We had a pretty cold winter which made it seem even more necessary.

Subsequently, all I did was quilt it on my machine - something I don't do very often - using the walking foot to make lots of "straight" lines.
Though it is not a masterpiece of a quilt, in this case, the fabric and the message that sends, was as important as anything, and I am pretty sure Jeremiah liked it. Here's a picture of him holding it with me on Christmas morning.

This is Your Life

This year I gave away two quilts for Christmas. This one was pretty special for me and I had worked on it for a whole year - in secret! It is the first quilt I have every made for Steve. Of course, all the quilts I have made for us and used in the house have been for him and me, and we have slept under one (or sometimes to or three) of my quilts for fifteen years or more, but this is the first quilt I have made specifically for Steve.

Several years ago, I started keeping back some of our discarded T-shirts and rather than giving them to the Open Door, saving them for a T-shirt quilt. Steve doesn't wear T-shirts very often, but he often gets them from programs he goes to or places he works. He also had a bunch of old T-shirts in his drawers when I first came into his life, so one day we went through his drawer and managed to discard some really oldies but goodies with the promise that they would not be thrown out but put in a quilt. This all happened several years ago, and Steve forgot all about it. He is a busy man and the last thing he worries about is T-shirts that are not in his drawer!

So I had all these T-shirts in a basket and I had even saved some very special fabrics to go with them. But making a T-shirt quilt is a lot of work and not my favorite thing to do. For one thing, you have to cut up all the T-shirts and then iron the part you want to use onto fusible webbing so you can actually work with it. Otherwise the T-shirt fabric is much too stretchy and difficult to work with. And that is a very tedious and hot process, which I dreaded. Secondly, the images from the T-shirts which you end up selecting for the quilt are of various sizes, some are large like the entire front of the shirt, some just a little square from the front left pocket, and so forth. So putting the quilt together is a huge puzzle.

All this had me procrastinating for a long time until my dear friend, Michelle Hiskey, who has become somewhat of an expert T-shirt quilt maker after making one for each of her nieces and nephews as they graduate from high school and several others on commission for others also, agreed to help me on this one. She is SUCH a good friend and SUCH a great quilter.

We put most of the top together at a retreat at Kanuga in January, and I continued to work on it and the back at a retreat in Georgia.
It was a lot easier to do it all at retreat to keep it secret from Steve, though I am quite sure I could do a lot of it at home also. Most of the time he is not here! And even when he is, he does not pay very close attention to what I am working on. So as long as I had made sure he didn't notice one of his old T-shirts, I could have done it. The problem was that working on a quilt like this you really have to be able to lay it all out to get a sense of how it fits together and that would be hard to do surreptitiously! I did put the binding and label on at home, however.
Though it is here on my blog, this is really a group quilt. In addition to the invaluable help I got from Michelle in making the quilt, two other wonderful friends contributed to the quilt: The beautiful ikat fabrics in the borders of the top and on the back of the quilt were given to me by our friend Tina Ruyter many years ago. Tina imported the fabrics from Bali and gave me a whole bunch of them, mostly smaller pieces, years ago. I have used pieces of them here and there in quilts over the years, but had wanted to use them in this T-shirt quilt all along. Originally I thought they could be sashing, but realized that would be too confusing. They also are fairly lightweight, so it would have been hard to work with them right next to the heavy fusible backed T-shirts. I love the way they frame the quilt, however. I still have lots of them left and am trying to think up the next wonderful project to showcase them. Thanks Tina!

And many thanks, as always, to Regina Carter, for the wonderful machine quilting job without which there would be no quilt.

Mysterious Stars

I do not have any children of my own, by choice, but not because I do not like children! So I enjoy the fact that I have gotten to know my best friend Michelle's two daughters, Joey and Sim, quite well over the years. So well, in fact, that I have become their honorary auntie and they my honorary nieces. This is a special treat since my flesh and blood nieces and nephews live thousands of miles away in Denmark and I don't get to see them nearly enough.

Therefore, when Joey turned 13 in December, I thought it only fitting to give her a quilt, just as I had given my nephew Jens a quilt for his 13th birthday the previous year.
Fortunately, the quilt I had been working on as a result of a "mystery block of the month" project in my local guild, seemed to be a good choice. I had been pretty frustrated with the "mystery block" project; we had not been given enough information - I thought - to make good choices about how to pick fabrics, and as a result a couple of the early blocks turned out very strange. So I started cheating and not cutting my fabrics until I actually saw what the blocks looked like :). I just could not see making all those blocks and having them turn out useless.

With the help of Tori at Wilderness, who picked out the yellow fabric, which I didn't originally have as part of this quilt, I think the project turned out pretty nicely at the end. It was a mystery to me, because I generally have a pretty good idea of what my quilt will look like when I start working on it.
I usually like to piece my back out of what remains from making the top, and/or use big pieces of fabric I already have. But I fell in love with the piece which is at the center of the back here, one day at the shop, and knew it would look pretty good in this quilt so I got it for the back and I am very happy I did. Even though I still had to piece some strips to make the back wide enough.

Isn't that just like a teenager! A very mysterious way of saying Thanks Auntie! I love it. Of course, it was Joey's wonderful mother, Michelle, who insisted on taking the picture, but at least Joey didn't run away screaming or completely hide behind the quilt.

Madagascar

My friends Jan and Mou had been waiting to adopt a baby for a while. Last year, they lost a baby when the birth mother changed her mind after the baby was born. They had waited on this particular baby for many months, the birth mother had chosen them to adopt her baby and they traveled to be with her at the time of delivery, but once the baby was born she changed her mind, as, of course, she had every right to do. Nevertheless, it was as close to a miscarriage for them as you can get when you are not actually pregnant yourself.

So we were all overjoyed when they were suddenly notified that another baby was available, less than a week before Baby Jaden was born! Unfortunately, because of the short notice, I didn't have a quilt ready. I had started this, way back, but never finished it, so I had to hustle when I suddenly heard they had left to pick up a baby boy! Several weeks after they returned to Danville, I was able to go visit them, meet the little wonder, and hand over the quilt.

I put some random African prints on the back.
I hand quilted the Madagascar panel, and since Jaden is African American, I thought the African theme, ended up being a good fit! By the way, Jaden seems to be an amazing fit with Jan and Mou also and is growing into a big, strong and very happy baby boy, who will soon be much taller than at least one of his moms.

Dog Bed 10

I always get a lot of stuffing for dog beds when I visit Atlanta, and especially when I also attend a quilt retreat. My dear friend Michelle, has been a particularly generous contributor of scrap materials lately because she has made a lot of absolutely stunning T-shirt quilts. (When you make a T-shirt quilt, you use only a small part of the shirt, the part with the logo or image, and the rest becomes trash or dog bed stuffing!).

So, last time I went, instead of carrying all the scraps back home, I brought with me a dog bed cover and made the bed while in Atlanta. And I left the bed there with Michelle to give to somebody in need of same. As it turned out, Michelle donated the bed to a silent auction held for the benefit of VOX, an Atlanta based non-profit organization dedicated to giving teenagers the opportunity to express themselves and tell their stories through publication of a news paper by the teens themselves. www.voxrox.org
Before she gave the bed away, Michelle made and attached this beautiful label. I love the label, and wish I had thought of the idea and a way of making some kind of labels for the dog beds. I may still come up with something for the future - feeling sure that Michelle will not mind if I do copy her good idea. However, as Michelle and I discussed, such labels will have to be attached by machine and not as this is by hand, as a curious dog can too easily tear this off.
Dog Bed 10 sold at the auction for in the neighborhood of $50, and I am so happy that our scraps have helped make that donation to VOX possible. Since I have no idea who bought the dog bed, however, I obviously do not have a photo of the lucky dog on the bed :)

Imagine that! No sooner do I say that I will never get a picture of the dog on the bed, than Michelle emails me this picture! The person who purchased the dog bed at the auction, emailed it to her. So here is the dog, a rescued, retired grey hound - name and gender unknown - on Dog Bed 10. I don't know a lot about grey hounds, other than they can run incredibly fast, and that when not forced to race they can be very lazy and love to lay around the house. I hope this retired dog will get lots of time to lie on this bed.