A tale of two baby quilts

 Recently a dear friend (hey there, Julie!) asked me sweetly if I would be interested to make a couple of remembrance baby quilts for her. Her twin boys had achieved the ripe old age of 3 and she couldn't bear to part with so many of their precious little things from infancy. Knowing exactly how she felt (heh, I have a stash of baby clothes that get me all teary whenever I come across them, too), I happily agreed. She had kept batches of their little shirts and onesies and such and collected a couple of big (ulp!) bags for me. Here's just one of the bags...

Upon sorting through the clothes I realized several important things: A. they were all in very good shape (no horrible stains or damage) B. the colors and patterns were in a range that would harmonize pretty well and C. almost everything was a knit (i.e. t shirt material). A and B had me stoked. C....eh, not so much. See, the trouble with t shirt knit fabric is that its so stretchy in every dimension. Which, of course, is why t shirts are so darn comfy and everyone has a zillion of them. But for sewing, yikes!  A nightmare! Cutting and sewing small shapes accurately and making anything that even looks halfway accurate was going to be categorically impossible no matter what I did.

Hmm. What to do, what to do?  I wasn't stumped--it was a fabric after all-- and I am the master, er, mistress of fabrics, am I not? Why, yes. Yes, I am. thank you very much. :)

SO... I explored my options and did some heavy cogitation for a couple of weeks. Finally, I decided that I would apply my favorite fusible interfacing, Pellon's ShirTailor,  to the little mini swatches of knit fabrics and then start cutting my squares from that reinforced and, more importantly, no longer stretchy material. Luckily the interfacing I use is not horribly stiff and scratchy; the resulting bonded fabric + interfacing will be a little less floppy but still be soft enough for cuddling.  4 inch side is my preferred square size--I've made several quilts based on that dimension and I find it just right. Allowing for a 1/4 inch seam allowance I thus cut 4 1/2 inch squares.

 So first I had to cut all of the little shirts and onesies apart, trimming out the snaps and other unusable bits. That took a peaceful afternoon just me and my fabric shears. You can see the pile above stacked up and waiting for the next step.

Luckily I had several yards of my interfacing on hand and could get right to applying it. Trim to match shape first, then iron. Accumulate another pile of interfaced swatches. Here's one ready for the stack. Guess what else I learned? I'm going to need a lot of interfacing. And when I say "a lot", I mean yards and yards. sigh. Which is fine. JoAnn's always has coupons and a single cut of a yard good counts just like any other item.

And here's the first square! Now, I just need to cut  a few more....

stay tuned!

Recycle mania

Hi everyone--I've got two new projects cooking so I need to fill you in! The first is an offshoot of my T-shirt textile postcards. I'll be selling my postcards in a fun shop down in Winter Park soon, so I was gearing up to make enough for the order. The shop is Earth Inspired Living and it is just perfect for my T-shirt postcards. Or my postcards are perfect for the shop. Hopefully they will sell well and I'll get lots of future orders for more cards. I'm pretty excited to enter the world of retail.

Sooooo....I got to looking at all of the leftover T-shirt material after I had cut out the images for the cards and thought: "hmmmmm, hate to throw all of that away". So I cut the remaining shirt material into continuous inch (or so) wide strips and knotted them together as you can see here. Looks suspiciously like a ball of yarn, doesn't it? Did you know that I'm a big knitter from way back? Haven't done any knitting lately--we just don't need wool socks and sweaters here in Florida so its pretty pointless.  So I dug out my needles and started playing around. A little experimenting with knitting and crocheting and I hit upon the right procedure and guage. I'm thinking: bathmats, trivits, coasters, small rugs. Should be fun!  I'll post more pictures soon, stay tuned!

Upcycled T-shirts

Been pretty busy with my day job so I haven't had time to get in the studio as much as I'd like to. But I am trying to get ready for a little sidewalk Art Stroll next week in Baldwin Park. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=99819432058&ref=ts So I'm bustling away making postcards to fill up my cool new postcard rack (I showed it here a few posts back) which I will be using in the show. But, DAMN, that rack holds a lot of cards. I have been making cards like there's no tomorrow and its still not full. Close, though. Today I completed sixteen T-shirt post cards. Since I'm a pack-rat from way back, I naturally saved some of my kids' cutest t-shirts from when they were just little guys. Couldn't bear to toss them or pass them on to good-will. Thought I might someday make a quilt out of them but that idea has since palled. Hmmm, but post cards! Now there's an idea! I did have to iron on some stabilizing interfacing to the back of the t-shirts and then I just trimmed out the images and did some simple contour quilting around them. A matching or contrasting color for the blanket-stitch that goes around the edge completed these fast and easy postcards. Check them out!


Here's the whole batch all piled up. Can you tell we have 2 boys and a girl who all like critters of all sorts, especially bugs? They still do, too even though they're not so little any more.


My favorite is this froggy one. I love the whimsical aspect of the drawings. I got 2 cards out of this particular shirt.


There are also a lot of realistic image shirts in my stash, including these spiders. I sure hope someone else like spiders as much as we do and buys one or more of these!


It occurred to me that I've never shown the back of one of my post cards. As you can see, I use some vintage style letter stamps to write "POST CARD" and delimit the address side from the message side. The plain white fabric takes writing from a sharpie or other permanent pen no problem.