More Memories

May 26, 2008October 26, 20082 Comments

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.

Autograph Pillow

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.

Wallhanging

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.

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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

More Hexagons!

April 29, 2008October 26, 20085 Comments

Yesterday, I promised that I would show you how to finish a quilt made with the hexagon blocks.

If anyone was brave enough to purchase equipment and start making their own hexagon block quilt after reading yesterday’s post – that brave soul now has a quilt that looks something like this:

And by the way, if anyone WAS that brave – I’m shocked – but congratulations!— Laughing 8

Now, how to get from that admittedly interesting, but difficult to work with, pointed border to something a bit more traditional? Get out your rotary cutter! Using a straight edge ruler, trim the points from each side of the quilt (top and bottom won’t have points)

After you have straighted the sides, all you have to do is add a regular border to finish the quilt top!

This quilt is quite obviously not made of several different fabrics the way the “I Spy” quilt from yesterday was. Instead, the fabric in the hexagons is a young ballerina, with a coordinating pink fabric used for the points and as the border. Here’s a closer look. As you can see from the image below on the right, the ‘star’ effect of the triangles is more obvious in this quilt because the colors are all very complimentary instead of having as much contrast as you will naturally get in the much busier “I Spy” style.

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But, we aren’t done with this fabric yet! Take a look at this project, which uses all three sizes of hexagon rulers:

The jacket pattern is Butterick #5039.

This jacket took on a new look when the seamstress decided to embellish by using the Marti Michell hexagon rulers. Because there are three sizes of hexagons in the package – all were used. The bottom of the jacket has the largest hexagon or a border. The border going up and down on the front of the jacket uses the medium hexagon. And of course at the bottom of the sleeves is the smallest hexagon.

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As you can see, there are lots of things that can be done with the hexagon block. The jacket shows that it makes a great border, think of what a border like this would look like going around a quilt with a large focal block in the center….

Sheila Reinke, Heart of Sewing
Sheila

I Spy Quilt

April 28, 2008October 26, 20087 Comments

I was asked recently to share some hints on a quilt commonly known as the “I Spy” quilt. These quilts are often made using squares or other shapes, but I like using a hexagon, and I was thrilled to find that the new Marti Michell rulers included a set of rulers perfect for this quilt – called “Hexagons and 60º Triangle”.

As I have said before – the right tool really does make all the difference. The 60º triangle ruler is designed to go with the hexagons perfectly (so I suggest making certain you store them together once they are out of the package). Depending on the size of hexagon ruler you choose, you will line your triangle up on the edge or the first or second lines on the inside of the triangle. But, I’m getting ahead of myself…

1. Select the fabric(s) you will use – if this is going to be a true “I Spy” quilt, you will want several very different images for the quilt. Then you will ask the child to find or match the horse blocks, or the two cars, or whatever.
2. Using your hexagon ruler, you will ‘fussy cut’ the image you want out of each of the fabrics. The term “fussy cut” is when you take a ruler and instead of just cutting straight across the fabric like in strip quilting, you move the ruler around on your fabric until you have centered a design on your fabric in the center of your ruler. As an example in this picture we have decided to center the horses in the center. (Seam allowance is included in the ruler proportions, see the dotted line on the ruler.)

For this quilt, I used the largest of the hexagons. It gives me more flexibility for centering the images I want on each block, and will be more fun for the child to use when the quilt is completed.
3. The next step is to use the triangle ruler to cut two blue corners to sew on your hexagon. Since this is the large hexagon you would use the 3” or largest triangle. For each hexagon you will need two triangles. The first triangle is sewn to the upper left hand corner, then you sew the next triangle to the opposite corner.

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4. After you have sewn the two triangles onto all of your blocks, you will begin to assemble the blocks together.

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5. As you are sewing the blocks together, you will create strips, and those strips will be sewn together. (More on how to finish this quilt type in tomorrow’s post).

As the strips are sewn together, you will see that a star effect is being created throughout the quilt top. Can you see the six-pointed star centered in this picture?