Quilt Finish and Presentation

So you remember this quilt I was making?

I used tshirts from the haunted house I work for. I had a problem with some of the stabilizer that I used because I used two-sided stuff instead of regular stabilizer. My sister (I believe) had the simple and common sense solution of just sticking muslin to the back of those squares. That would "use up" the adhesive so to speak, and keep it from sticking to the wrong place.

And that is what I did. Apparently I used too much heat when I applied to first side, however, and the muslin didn't stick very well anyway!! Oh well, I left it there just in case. What didn't stick down was caught in the seam so I think that is taken care of.

Once the pieces were prepared, I could piece them together. That didn't take too long since the squares are so large and there were only three columns by five rows to do. The only snag I ran into was that I had to move the quilt from one spare room to the other and got some of the squares mixed up. See if you can tell in the final pictures. I decided it wasn't worth picking out and it only bothers me a little. :)

Once the top was sewn, I layered it with the flannel "batting" and then the flannel backing. I went with flannel on the inside for two reasons: with the large squares and not wanting to sew in the middle of them, it was too large an area not to tack down a batting; and I didn't want a super warm blanket.

I decided to tie the quilt instead of sew it, again for two reasons: sewing knit fabrics down can be tricky to do right, yielding bad results; and I thought ties suited the character of the top better.

I went with a pinkish yarn to match the back:

It's leftovers from a pair of socks I made for my sister.

Then I marked the seam of every side of each square so that I would tack it down three times, plus each corner. I marked and sewed from the front, but you can see on the back that I didn't cut between each stitch, but ran the yarn from one spot to the next:

Here's a close up:

This was a tip I read once but had not had a chance to try. It did go faster as you didn't have to cut the yarn between each spot and it made it easier to start each stitch. (You didn't have to fuss with not pulling the yarn all the way through.) And it also saved on the amount of yarn you used because there was not a lot of extra between each stitch.

Here's a view of the front:

I put Xs at the corners, and two side-by-side straight
stitches on the sides.

Once they were sewn, I could cut the yarn between:

And then knot. I had read that a good way to keep the knots from loosening was to double wrap the first step of a square knot. I tried this and the knots were coming out before I moved to the next row! Very maddening. It's a good thing my sister (another one) was visiting because she said you had to double wrap the second step for it to hold. She was right. I ended up double wrapping both steps, but the knots stayed in much better at least.

I also think that using a (non-superwash) wool will help because as the blanket is washed the strands will felt on themselves and it will soon be impossible to untie them. And hopefully, being sock yarn, the wool will stand up to the use.

Once that was done, it was time for a binding.

I used commercial binding because I wasn't quite up to making my own. It works great but feels awful (to me) because of the high polyester content. It was a nice nondescript edging, in any case, and that is what I wanted.

Then I was done!

Oh no, then there was the label. I think labels are important on quilts. Especially gift quilts as you can mark an occasion on the label and give wash instructions, but I really hate to make them. It's like thinking your home after a long bike ride and then realizing you have one more big hill to climb. Ugh.

But I did it. I took a piece of the white tshirt fabric and laid it out on the table. (I taped the edges to keep it taught, but this is a knit fabric with no stabilizer--it didn't help.) I wrote out what I wanted to say line by line on a piece of paper with the pen I was going to use. Then I slipped the paper under the fabric so I could use it as a guide as I wrote on the fabric.

As I finish each line, I can move the paper to center properly the next line, and then trace again.

It works pretty well.

(But recently I was told an even better trick for labels. Someone who shares my aversion to making labels says if there's not too much information, she has her sewing machine "type" it onto the binding before she sews it on. Then she puts the binding on the quilt so the letters are on the back. My machine will sew letters too, so I think I'll be trying that on the next one!)

Then I was done.

And I gave it to my (former) coworker at her graduation party, not wanting to wait for her "retirement" lunch.

She really likes it.

(My boss was at the party and was more than a little jealous of the quilt. The next Monday at work, he said I ruined it for him because he had wanted to give her the best present. Knowing what he gave her was a framed picture of the two of them (a picture I had ordered and another coworker had framed), I grinned and said, "If you want to play with the big boys, you'd better learn to keep up.")

And then a week later I asked for the quilt back so I could show it at the fair. Yes, fair preparations have begun again...

New (Quick?) Project

Last weekend I made some progress on a project I've had in mind for a while. I think I actually got the idea from a haunted house volunteer who wants to do a similar project for my boss, but I shamelessly took the idea to make for one of the students that works for us. She is headed to college this coming fall and has a busy summer, so we might not see her much. That means "good-bye" day is coming all too soon.

Usually we have a farewell lunch for departing students sometime before they leave, and I wanted to make a gift for her--a "tshirt" quilt made out of the haunted house tshirts. (We have a new one each year, in a new colour, that is handed out to the volunteers at the end of the season.)

It's standard practice to turn in any shirts you're "done with" to the office. The idea is that they "stay in the family" and not be sold at yard sales or given to second hand stores. Every year at the wrap-up pizza party, we put them out so that volunteers can take them if they want.

A coworker brought in several from her daughters in nice colours and I snatched them up for my project. I supplemented them with a few from our overstock and came up with a plan:

The squares will finish at 13" and this should make
a nice "throw" size quilt.

Last weekend I finished backing and cutting out all the squares. The shirts have designs on the front and back so I get a lot of fabric from one shirt. Since tshirts are made from knit fabrics which are too stretchy to just sew together, they have to be backed with stabilizer or interfacing.

For the first batch, I used some applique fusible that I had lying around, but I've since realized that might become a problem. It's fusible on both sides, so if I ever hit them with an iron now, the squares are going to stick to whatever they're sitting on. If I avoid that while getting the quilt together, then there's still a possibility that they will get ironed to the batting after the quilt is assembled. Not so bad if everything's all smooth and lined up, but if the quilt were wrinkled, it could really wreck it.

I've thought about prophylactically ironing those squares to the batting, but I think that will make the quilt really stiff. I think I'm going to leave it, make sure to put "Do not iron" on the label, and take my chances. (I mean, what are the chances that a college student is going to own an iron, let alone use it on a quilt?)

The second batch of squares, done after I ran out of the applique fusible was treated with regular light-weight iron on interfacing. They should be no problem.

The quilt also contains a little joke. See the left white square? It's got a different design and is dated much earlier than the rest. Well, every year at the pizza party my boss makes a big to-do about who has the oldest tshirt. He promises a cruise to the person with the oldest shirt. He starts calling out recent years, and then goes further and further back until it's down to one of the other Board members and him. And he knows his shirt is one year older than the other Board member's.

About the second year I saw this performance, I said to my coworkers that we need to talk to the printers and get an older shirt made up to show him up. This year one of them took my words to heart and had the printers make up a few shirts for us to wear with the original logo on them. No one knew the exact year that the haunted house started, but they picked something close and went with it. We surprised my boss at the party when we all beat him by more than a decade:

We're still waiting for the cruise. My boss keeps calling us all "big cheaters" while I am sticking to my story that I found them at Goodwill.