T-shirt Quilt Delivered!

Today I delivered the quilt to Nancy and Shel Ferdman for their daughter, Katharine.  It was the t-shirt quilt.  I had worked on it for quite a while.  It was fun.  She had sent some really cute tees.  She chose a backing that was bright and perfect for a college student.  It was challenging quilting it, because it was such a large and heavy quilt.  Bill helped me put it on the frame.  Once on, I found that it was hard to roll the top tightly on the  bar.  One of the blocks had her letter from high school on it. It made that block so much thicker.  I ended up leaving the tension off of all the bars, just trying to keep them as taught as possible manually.  After a prayer for help, I was amazed at how well it went.  I had the whole quilt quilted in just 2 hours!!!  I meandered the whole thing, using a variated thread from Superior threads. 

Here is a close-up of the quilt, as well as showing how cute the backing was!

This quilt was so big, Bill had a hard time getting a picture of the whole thing!

Pauline's quilt

I spent several days last week and yesterday afternoon and evening working on a quilt for a woman that works at TEA.  Her son graduated from high school and is going to University of Central Florida.  She made a beautiful quilt for him using all batiks. It is gorgeous!  She used a pattern from a Kaffe Fassett book.  She has a black batik for the backing and it's 108" wide- I love it... no seam!  I made a pantograph pattern to use, with the logo for UCF in it- a Pegasus.  It is big meandering and then the Pegasus.  I had to learn how to offset the quilting so that one row started with the Pegasus design in it and the next one started with the meandering.  Luckily for me, I found good instructions on the internet.  Now if I can just remember what to do!  :-)   I used an orange thread for the top and bobbin.  It was alot of fun.  Last night I finished it.  It really looks nice.  Hope Pauline likes it!


This shows the quilting.  Pegasus is the logo for UCF so I did continuous line quilting involving the Pegasus.



Pauline's quilt was fun working on.  I loved the batiks she chose.  Maybe some day I'll do one with batiks!

T-shirt Quilt

Friday afternoon and evening I worked on cutting apart the teeshirts and ironing the interfacing to them.  I spent 6 hours on them.  I made myself a pressing board just for this task.  I covered a piece of 1/4" plywood with a quilted silver ironing board fabric that I bought at Joanns.  It worked just great for this project!

I finished putting the interfacing on the tee blocks on Sunday afternoon.  I worked all afternoon today trimming the blocks so that they all measure 14 3/4 " (I know that's a wierd measurement... I would have liked them to be smaller, but there was one tee shirt that made it necessary for that size.)  Next step... cutting the fabric to frame each block, the sashing and the intersecting squares.

I'm in business!

 

I got my first order on the 4th of July! A co-worker of Bill's asked me to quilt a quilt for her parents' 50th anniversary.  It was a 69"x69" quilt.  Around its border were blocks that different family members had signed.  In the center was a machine embroidered block with their name.  I decided to use a pantograph that had hearts in it.  It was a littler un-nerving to be working behind the machine.  That's where I stand when I use pantographs.  The laser light is on the back of the machine and I have that light follow the pantograph, which is on the frame table.  Bill stood in front of the frame and watched as I sewed.  I had to be careful to not stitch over the beautiful embroidered block.  I meandered in the sashing between all of the border blocks.  I used a variated thread, which showed up beautifully on the back of the quilt.  I really had fun with it- and appreciated Bill cheering me on.