I Love Being Mommy’s Girl
When I received a Facebook message from a woman who wanted me to make a quilt for her daughter, I was excited to begin a new project. My newest client shared that the shirts were from her daughter’s elementary school years. She and her daughter had always talked about making a quilt as a remembrance of those years. My excitement dimmed a bit when she delivered the shirts and shared that her daughter had cut the images from the shirts when she was in 5th grade. Oh, no! Mom shared that she wanted her daughter to be able to wrap herself up in the quilt, rather than hang it on the wall, and that she wanted the fabric “picture framing” to be black.
I laid out the fabric squares against a black background to see how they would look and realized that several of the shirts were black and would fade into a black background. I would have to use another color fabric to provide a contrast between the black shirts and the black background.
I was looking at 16 child sized shirts which had already been cut down a lot smaller than I usually cut shirts. Even though it made me smile a bit imagining a ten year old girl choosing her favorite shirts and then carefully cutting the images out of them and dreaming of the cool blanket her mom was going to make, I was a little horrified at the small sizes and jagged edges of what remained of the t-shirts I had to work with. This was going to require a lot of planning! Remember that high school geometry class you knew you would never ever use?
Some of the shirts would require a little bit of Frankenstein piecing. I stabilized each shirt, then began to cut them down, or build them up, to the size I wanted to work with.
Once all the t-shirts were the same size, I added a border to each square. This was to add some inches to the finished quilt and to give the black shirts a buffer from the black background.
Once all the shirts had the extra border, it was time to arrange and sew the rows together. When the quilt top is complete, then I layer the muslin backing, the fiberfill, and the top together, tie knots every four inches to be sure the three layers stay together and then bind it all together.
This quilt was a Christmas gift from my client to her daughter. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good quilt.
