Our wonderful next door neighbors moved to a different state last month. They’ve been an integral part of our lives for the last 9 years, and our kids — especially Charlotte and their daughter — are great friends. I couldn’t let them leave without doing something, so I made a memory quilt to help them remember all of the fun times our families had, and all of the things our daughters and their group of friends did together. (And by extension, all the fun things our mom group did together!)
I gathered some outgrown t-shirts from my own house, and some other moms provided more. The elementary school store even had leftover shirt designs from previous years and donated them to the cause.
After cutting the shirts and applying fusible interfacing (I used Pellon PLF36, one of my go-tos for t-shirt quilts), I had to figure out layout. I ended up constructing the quilt top in columns, where the width of each column was driven by the shirt designs. The layout evolved as I went, but thankfully I didn’t run into issues and the blocks came together surprisingly easily! I incorporated a few stripes of plain color shirt material from the t-shirt backs, just to help balance the overall color flow.
For the backing, I chose a fun capybara print since their daughter loves animals, and I even took the time to pattern match the seam — for the first time ever! — using my friend Hilary’s tutorial. (I’d never done this because I thought it would be annoying, but it really wasn’t bad at all.)
I chose a leopard print pantograph and sized it quite large to make the stitching less dense and save time on the quilting stage — but the joke was on me because, in my haste, I didn’t check the total top-to-bottom size…which ended up being about 2″ larger than I can fit between the bars on my longarm. FACEPALM. So I got to enjoy the “fun” experience of rolling the quilt back and forth a couple times on each pass, and having to realign the pantograph each time. Whew. Thankfully the panto was fairly forgiving and in the end it worked out ok, but I will definitely remember that particular lesson learned!!
I finished the binding on this quilt about 3 hours before our neighbors’ going away party, so I was able to gift it there. I hope they love it for many years to come. We miss them greatly!
The stats:
- Quilt measures 50″ x 60″.
- Backing and binding is the mint capybara print from the Animal Animal collection by Ruby Star Society.
- Batting is Quilters Dream 80/20.
- Pieced with Aurifil 50 wt thread in dove.
- Quilted on my APQS Millie with Glide thread in linen.
- Pantograph is Seeing Spots by The Quilting Mill.
