A Quilty Finished Object!

My friend Stacey gave me the t-shirts almost five years ago, shortly after I offered to do this for her.

I got them washed and rough-cut (large) a year ago.

Fused the shirts in March. Sliced and diced in May. Figured out which could be easily cut down into 12.5” unfinished squares and quickly realized that Math was required.


Graph paper. Used for the size of the shirts and the size of the sashing of the center “motif.” Center motif on the left, "whole quilt" on the right.

I took this project to the last few Fridays in Los Angeles and finished it on my last Friday at Sandy’s house. As I was driving back to Redondo Beach, I realized that since this newly finished top was going to be quick-turned to a fleece backing, what I really wanted/needed to do was serge it. My serger had been put on the truck a week earlier, and that day had been unloaded in Pittsburgh.

So the next day, I ran a bunch of errands, including dropping at Luella’s Quilt Basket, where I begged Luella to use her classroom tables to do a quick-and-dirty pinning, and then use one of her demo sergers to put the thing together. She was kind enough to not only say “Of Course!!!,” but to offer a regular sewing machine to quilt the thing.

I didn’t have time to stick around and take her up on the quilting offer, and I had high hopes that I could get this quilted before I took off for Pittsburgh, but the fates conspired against me and I never sewed another stitch (by machine) in Southern California.

After getting as much quilty stuff organized and unpacked as I could over the last few weeks, I brought a whack of stuff up to the Lake this weekend in anticipation of Tuesday’s Pineapple class. And after “the boys” (my dad and the hubster) took off for Pittsburgh (where they have “real jobs” to attend tomorrow), I finished reading HP5, then set up my Brother 1500 and started ditch quilting.

I took a good picture of the quilt in my office building at UCLA (above), where I was able to pretty much take a straight-down shot. I didn’t take a new photo tonight, but trust me. It’s quilted and ready to send to Stacey, along with the baby quilt for her son, who was born on D-Day.

Oh, and I took a break for Sunset. Enjoy!


Since nobody even guessed, the "leetle less than half an hour" quote the other day was from The Princess Bride and the "Baby Ducks are cute, I hate cute!" line is from Bull Durham. Those are two of the "five movies I'd take to a deserted island" so it's quite disappointing nobody even guessed!