On Saturday, I promised another group of quilts from the book “Memory Quilts – with T-shirts, Autographs, and Photos” from Better Homes and Gardens. As you may recall, we looked at photo quilts and T-shirt quilts in our first post. Today, we will look at autograph quilts.

When most people think of the word ‘autograph’, the first thing that comes to mind is a famous person’s signature. Well, for these quilts, the famous people are the important people in your life. I’m actually going to use the term autograph very loosely for this post – because as you will see a little later, one of these projects doesn’t even use signatures!

For the first quilt, something that you might expect to be called an autograph quilt – and a great idea for a graduation party, wedding or baby shower! This project is a 30″ quilted pillow cover – see all of the white spaces? Guests at the graduation party will sign this, and it will be a great gift for the grad who is going to be living miles from home and familiar faces.

For a project like this, make sure you use a true permanent marker – that is intended to last through the wash. If you don’t know what type of pen you will need, check with your fabric store, they will be able to help you.

This next quilt is more inspirational, with phrases like “be creative”, and “my first quilt retreat” on the borders. Looks like the phrases here may have been designed to encourage the creator of the quilt – what a great uplifting type of project that would be! Once again, this quilt uses permanent fabric markers to ink the messages.

And the final project is a wallhanging, designed to be a family tree of sorts. Family names have been embroidered onto the quilt, along with wedding dates for each of the quilter’s children.

space

Did you notice anything else about these quilts? They are all made using the same wallhanging pattern – but the various fabric choices really make each of them look very unique. With all three of these quilts in the same room, most people wouldn’t see they are all the same pattern at first glance.

We’ve talked about using permanent pens to autograph your quilts, and you’ve seen the results of using an embroidery machine. But there is another option that can be used, and we discussed that in an earlier post – you can use photo fabric. Transferring signatures or messages onto photo fabric paper and then incorporating that into your design. Think of preserving a message from a person who can’t be there to sign the quilt themselves – their message could be photocopied onto the photo fabric paper, and you could do all sorts of things with it! For those of you who haven’t seen the post on that idea yet – here’s the link.

Sheila Reinke, Heart of Sewing
Sheila