My Favorite Project from 2022

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. This is my first post since August! I’ve been blessed with lots of custom orders since my last post. In fact, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in t-shirt quilts! This is actually a fabulous problem to have, and I am NOT complaining. I am thankful to all of my clients for choosing me for something so important as making ANY type of quilt for them.

I’m sure there are a lot of you out there who have made more, but I feel like I have made a LOT of quilts this year. I have slide shows for each quarter on my Instagram: Quarter 1, Quarter 2, Quarter 3, and Quarter 4. With 2022 coming to an end, I thought it would be fun to do a post on my favorite project this year.

There are a lot to choose from. So, it’s a hard choice. But, my favorite project for this year was actually two quilts I made for a local client. I made a t-shirt quilt for his daughter in December of 2021. When he decided to have a quilt made for his wife, she referred him to me.

The story behind these two quilts

I suppose every quilt has a story, and the story behind these two quilts is a good one! If you’re already a little emotional today, it may even make you cry. It’s that sweet!

When I met with the client, he had a bag full of scraps that belonged to his wife’s mother and grandmother. She had a milestone birthday coming up soon, and he wanted to have a quilt made for her. I’m not a relationship expert, but I have been married for 21 years. Based on being married for 21 years, I’m going to go ahead and say that a husband that would do something like this for you is definitely a keeper! Another awesome thing is that he actually wanted me to make two quilts. His daughter, the one who referred him to me, had a milestone birthday coming up soon too. She had no idea when she messaged me that he planned to get her a quilt too. What a nice surprise that she referred her dad to me not knowing that he was going to have a quilt made for her as well.

Some other things I love about these two quilts.

There are a lot of things to love about these two. The scrappiness in these two quilts can’t be ignored. I do love a good scrappy quilt. I also like that they have a mix of solid blocks, nine patch blocks, and four patch blocks. The client wanted it to look old-fashioned. I thought the mixture of blocks worked well for this look. There were also a few fabrics in there that I’m pretty sure weren’t the 100% cotton us quilters are most used to working with. Our grandmothers were not fabric snobs. They often used old dresses and whatever else they could get their hands on to make their quilts. The occasional non-cotton item in these two go right along with the old-fashioned look we were trying to achieve.

When the client met with me to give me the scraps, we looked through the bag to decide how we wanted to divide it between the two quilts. There was some Christmas fabric in there. He wanted me to be sure to put that fabric in his wife’s quilt because she loves Christmas.

We also found some nine patch blocks that were already sewn together. They were obviously not quilting cotton and looked like they were made from old dresses. They were hand pieced. Some were pieced with yellow thread and some were pieced with a light purple thread. This goes back to how our quilting grandmothers used what they had available. These nine patches were pretty much your basic, super cool old quilt blocks. We decided to put these in his wife’s quilt as well. For the tiger prints we found, he wanted me to put those in his daughter’s quilt. All of the other fabrics were divided evenly between the two quilts. So, they are a lot alike but still each is unique and designed for the recipient. This goes back to what I said earlier about how husbands like this are keepers. Back to the scrappiness… These both have a scrappy binding. I love scrappy bindings.

Then, there’s the labels…

Check out the sweet messages he came up with to put on the labels. There’s nothing like a heartfelt message on a label to make a fabulous quilt even more fabulous. I got a little help from Melanie at Meander + Make. She makes all of my labels for me, and I highly recommend them. She customizes them to whatever you need, and they are high quality labels.

That’s all I’ve got for today

As always, thank you for taking the time to read my blog!

I hope you enjoyed it.

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Happy quilting!