Christmas quilts 2015

Now that Christmas is over I can do the big reveal of my recent finishes! The first is a lap quilt for Mark who loves all things beachy. I began it in January as a project with my quilting partner who made hers of bright pink, teal, and mustard prints with a white background. We worked on them every other week. The pattern is called “Pow-Wow” by Cluck Cluck Sew and I used prints from the “Shore Thing” and “Going Coastal” collections by Emily Herrick for Michael Miller fabrics. The gray pindot background is “Here Boy!” by Abi Hall for Moda Fabrics, the blue solid on the back is “Solids” by Polly Minick & Lauri Simpson for Moda Fabrics, and the binding is “Best.Day.Ever!” by April Rosenthal of Prairie Grass Patterns for Moda Fabrics.

Because the front blocks are pieced using the easy flying geese method, each block creates four bonus half-square triangles. The pattern includes some patterns to make small quilts from the bonus HSTs but I wasn’t sure I really needed another quilt with crabs, lobsters, kelp, and sea anemones. So my quilting buddy came up with the idea of sewing them together on the back in a chevron design to complement the chevron variation going on in the front design. So here is the back with blocks of extra fabric to finish the piecing. It was machine quilted at my local store, Just Sew, using blue thread in a loopy swirl design.

So now he has a lap quilt to match his couch and curl up with on those few cool nights in LA.

The second is a large lap quilt of Brian’s middle school and high school t-shirts. We saved them for this purpose and now that he is a professional actor in NYC, I figured it was the year to get it made. The shirts are mostly drama related but also include choir and orchestra, plus some student council memories including his two sweaters. I unpicked the patches from the front and sleeves and sewed them to the piece cut from the back with the large school logo.

The pattern was designed by Scott and myself using a vector design program on his computer called Inkscape. I looked at several tutorials but the one I used was on a blog I follow called soscrappy. Since some of the shirts were polos with a small logo and some were large, we decided to make the blocks different heights but all the same width. In some cases I sewed a portion of a sleeve or back to the front to include all the writing available, as in the dark blue Shakespeare block in the lower right column.

The front is obviously t-shirts and the sashing is from the “Reel Time” collection by Zen Chic for Moda Fabrics. The back is pieced with the same sashing, a back from a t-shirt that says What’s Your Story? because I thought it encapsulated what the quilt is all about, and a middle block with small pieces from the shirts appliqued to a background. These were pieces I didn’t have room to applique to the front pieces and I thought it would be fun to include them. The large piece at the top is also the binding and is Metallic Music Collage Holiday from the “All That Jazz” collection by Robert Kaufman. The swirly gold music figures on black are “Comfort & Joy” from Timeless Treasures, the drama masks are “Night at the Opera” by Maria Kalinowski for Kanvas, and the black solid has a subtle swirl and is “Moonshadow Formica Black” by Kim Schaefer for Andover Fabrics. The sashing is the same as the front. My quilting partner and I actually purchased it at a shop hop thinking it would be perfect backing for the back of Mark’s quilt but when I got it home and matched it to the background gray it was all wrong so it had been sitting in my stash for a few months. I bought the drama mask fabric and matched the other fabrics to that and when I got them all together the “Reel Time” fabric worked perfect! So I got to use it after all, just for a different quilt. The machine quilting was also done at Just Sew using gold thread in a swirl design with large open stars.

I also made matching hot pads and bookmarks for the boys out of leftover fabric as a little Christmas surprise. After the boys opened their quilts, Scott asked where was his quilt? I reminded him that the new bed quilt is planned to be from the Row by Row Experience rows we collected this year, so that is my big project for 2016. He will have to help me design the pattern first!

Hope you had a Merry Christmas! Ours is a very white one as you can see from our pre-Christmas Day photo shoot.