When I met up with Stacy in mid-april to deliver her weekender tote bag, I also met Stacy's friend Karen. Karen wanted to secretly have a quilt created out of Alyssa childhood's clothing for a very special high school graduation gift and I was up for the challenge. Karen created a cover story for why she was giving me a rubbermaid tub full of clothes. I double checked that she was certain I could cut anything up for the quilt and she assured me it was ok. She and Alyssa had gone through the clothes together and Alyssa had already pulled out a few things she wanted to save for her own kiddos to use some day.
Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photo of the big pile of clothes until after I had started deconstructing some items. But here's a lot of it...
I had about 6 weeks until Alyssa's graduation party and I already had some other projects in-progress to finish scattered about my sewing room. This lead to me taking over the living room so I could create a dedicated baby clothes quilt preparation room. I knew the clothing deconstruction and cutting process would take time and I'd need space to organize everything. Our dining room table and an ironing board were in the living room for several weeks but Jacob is patient and is accustomed to my whims...
Both pups were happy to keep me company but they did fall asleep on the job a lot. I used my wide ironing board and a rotating cutting mat for many, many hours of repetitive small cutting work.
After I had ripped apart all the clothing and set aside the most usable pieces I started putting together quilt block designs. Once I knew a block's design, I'd cut the clothing pieces down to size (don't forget your seam allowances).
Brewster and Maximus (see him back in the corner?) were bored by the block design phase but I loved it. It's like creating little colorful fabric puzzles.
I took a photo of each block design as I went, tweeted updates to celebrate some incremental accomplishments, stacked each block's pieces, and then separated each block's stack with a sheet of paper. By the way, my overall quilt design called for 36 12.5" blocks but I made several extras so I'd have some options for color placement.
Every clothing piece was fused to featherweight interfacing for stability before I pieced each block. All the work for prep, cutting, block designs (and re-cutting), and fusing is not a fast process. I did it over a couple weeks while I made some bags for Martha and Bee.
Don't forget...we haven't sewed a single stitch yet! :) Part 2 - Piecing the quilt top.
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