Progress on Memory Quilts

I am almost finished with the five memory quilts, made from my sister's clothing. There is one for each of her five kids. Each quilt is different. Each one seemed to tell me how to build it. Each of the kids selected a color scheme they liked and/or various articles of clothing that had meaning to them.

The pictures of this first one, for her youngest daughter, who just finished her freshman year in college, is the first quilt I started cutting, using the 4 1/2 inch squares. Cutting all that fabric into these tiny squares took so long that I switched to the 6 1/2 squares for the next three quilts. I did this first one, with the 4 1/2 squares in the rag quilt style. The back, not shown, is all the same material, a brown felt or fleece.

The quilt being modeled on the guest bed at one of my friend's houses.

The above quilt is the first one I started cutting, as stated, but then switched and started sewing on another one while in North Carolina, with my friend, Karen. Karen is a master quilter, though she is too humble to call herself that. Karen taught me so much in the week we were there. We laid out the pattern for a quilt done in the traditional style - machine sewing the pieces for the top, then sandwiching the batting, and hand stitching the back and sides to it, and stitching in-the-ditch (stitching in the seams) and other decorative hand stitching as I see fit. It is still not done because I wanted to take advantage of house sitting opportunities and space to lay things out on the floor or tables to do any cutting, trimming, and all the machine sewing work.  

Here is the one Karen and I laid out and started in NC. It is still not finished.  

The front, obviously.

The back.

As you can see from the pic of the back, I have a couple of puckers I need to fix.  I 

sewed on this one by hand, (above) while in the truck as we drove from North Carolina to Kansas City, then on to South Dakota, then back south to Memphis, then on to Maryland.  

I am still not finished, and I want to go back in and take out some of what I did and redo it better.  There are other things I want to redo as well, such as the stitching around the words, Hello Dolly. 

The one below might just be my favorite, though I like them all and they are all very different. This one I am so proud of because I laid it out myself, doing it in the traditional quilting style, like Karen had taught me. I know it is simple - all the same size squares and no fancy patterns, but hey, it is my first one done totally on my own. What has really stymied me with these quilts, besides working with all the different fabrics which meant varied thicknesses and stretchiness, has been how to incorporate the logos and pictures on T-shirts, Polo's and sweatshirts that have meaning for my sister's children. This quilt below, with the colors, just seemed to want to present the colors, the greens and grays and browns, a soft, mellow pallet.

So I put the T-shirt and sweat shirt logos, most of them, on the backing. I still have the quilting pins on there since I had not done any hand stitching at the point where this picture was taken. I think the backing will look better once the pattern of hand stitching penetrates the three patches sewed on. It will incorporate them better, I hope, onto the canvas. 

This back view of the quilt shows that it is still pinned.  The sides /layers have not even been 'hemmed'  yet. 

This is the view (below pic) from where I had my sewing machine set up in Fairfax, VA, where we were house sitting for a week and a half. 

And below is the pic where I am hand stitching, sitting on the front porch at our friends' house in Woodbine, MD, early in the morn in my 'jams, enjoying the morning air.