Learning to Quilt - Memory Quilts and Making Knits Work

I have been cutting squares from my sister's clothes, to make quilts for her children. She died January 19th. She has five kids and each one wants a quilt. Her clothes were divided up into bags, chosen by her kids for color scheme and memories, each bag with the initial of one of her children. There were 15 or so large bags.  

The below picture is my beast of a sewing machine, an old Kenmore, dating back 30-some years. The automatic bobbin winder doesn't work anymore. I had it fixed once, but it quit working again less than two weeks after getting it back home, supposedly fixed. The arm with the thread spool has broken off three times now, too. When I took it in to have the bobbin winder fixed, the guy glued the arm back on as well, and it worked just about as long as the bobbin-winder. I've since re-glued it a couple of times.  I try to be the only one who moves or stows my sewing machine. It's a beast, like me, but showing signs of age. 

Set up and cutting squares while house sitting for friends in MD.

These are just a few of the bags of my sister's clothing, sorted by color scheme, chosen by each of her five children.

These bags, and the container, are full of all my fabrics and old jeans or other items waiting to be made into something fun. 

These are all the cuttings for my sister's youngest daughter; mostly a pink and brown color scheme.  I sorted them all into baggies in order to stow them in an organized way and reducing bulk for the RV.

I've gone back and forth on how best to manage the process of making five quilts from 15 large garbage bags full of clothes, weighing several hundred pounds all total.

Part of me wanted to go all the way from start to finish with one quilt in order to see what would work best, enabling me to adjust and improve on the remaining quilts from what I learned. I've never made memory quilts, though I've done two rag quilts made from repurposed denim. I thought rag quilts would be the way to go with these fabrics since they cover the range of cottons to polyesters to faux fur. Rag quilts would be faster too.

I decided the smartest thing to do was to get all the bags cut up into squares with the simple notion of reducing the bulk that needs to be stored in the RV as we move from point to point, from house sitting to traveling.

When I'd finished cutting squares from the largest collection of color scheme bags for my sister's youngest child, a freshman in college now, I hadn't realized there were five bags in this collection when I started. I hadn't yet sorted the bags into each child's groupings. I probably would have started with a smaller collection of bags. Also, I did this first group, cutting them into small squares (4 1/2 inches).  Then I purchased the larger squares (6 1/2 inches) to do the rest, in order to save time, but also thinking that the larger squares will make for a nicer finished product, showing off colors better.

I started cutting the squares in a friend's house in Maryland and worked for about two weeks cutting squares in between seeing our kids, grand kids and friends and doing some baking.

Then we traveled to Connecticut to Dave's brother-in-law's house and I brought all the uncut bags and continued cutting squares when we weren't seeing family. I got all but three bags done.

Then we moved to North Carolina with our RV, to a friend's house who is a master quilter. She convinced me to bypass the rag quilting idea and to do a quilt by piecing the varied fabric squares together on the machine, but to finish it by hand stitching through the layers (including batting and backing), by stitching-in-the-ditch and doing decorative touches such as buttons.

Below are the stages we went through.

We laid things out to see how to attach and in what order. 

We attached the center part and lined up all the bagged extras to see what the border should look like, color-wise.

Here it is with the border partially attached. 

Here we have laid it out on the bed to see what it looks like and in different light. 

Now it is laid out on the table with the backing, so we can pin it. 

Getting ready to pin.

And now I am hand stitching in-the-ditch. 

My friend's sewing room - awesome.  She set up an extra table set up for my machine too! She uses the antique black machine on the far left. It is an old foot treadle machine that was converted to electric.  With all the quilters using fancy, expensive machines, my friend goes at it the old fashioned, hand-crafted way. 

Now we are both hand stitchingin-the-ditch with our quilts.  My friend is doing a memory quilt as well.  Her's is all cotton.  

I'm stitching in the ditch while my husband drives us to KC where we will attend a wedding.

I am glad I've had this first lesson in how to quilt something besides rag quilts. It is a wonderful skill though I can't say I'm skilled yet. I am in love with the idea and have lots of plans for future quilts and fabric arts ideas. However, doing five memory quilts this way, using knits, will be hard and very tedious. I might revert to rag quilts, or at least try one, to finish up the others.  I want each quilt to tell me what it wants to be.