Quilting to Pass the Time

It has been great to be back in the same country as Lady Hiva. We are both thankful nothing serious happened with her pregnancy while I was gone. She now looks like she has one of those plastic kid balls you can buy at the grocery store shoved under her shirt—kind of cute!

To pass some time—and use some fabric we had around—we decided to make some quilts. The first quilt we made from all our t-shirts as we have traveled the world. We were starting to get quite a collection and we seldom wear them all. We laid them out in a pattern we liked, bought a sewing machine and went to work.

The remnants of the shirts

Laid out, ready to sew

I tried to make it ‘fun’ by having the pattern include different sizes of material. This is NOT recommended. Unless you have several similar sized blocks you can pattern them together. T-shirt material stretches and as we were sewing the squares took on their own shapes. Needless to say, our quilt turned out….well…unique! We had fun though.

We put it on some quilting frames ($4 of pine 1x2s that were bungee corded to some kitchen chairs) and we quilted while watching General Conference. Both of us have sore finger tips now. But we have a quilt to enjoy.

The second quilt we made for baby Tau’aho. Lady Hiva’s mum had given her a bathrobe a year ago. It was soft fleece. The thing is, Lady never uses a bathrobe so it had been stuffed in a drawer. We I was packing up our stuff Lady said she felt guilty to have it thrown away. I told her we could make a quilt out of it.

So we cut the back out of the robe and sewed together some bright colored blocks for the other side. Lady free handed the design in the middle to join them and ‘Voila!’ we had a blanket! It turned out cute.

As we went along we were learning, we have a lists of “what not to do” and “what to do” for the next quilts we attempt.