QR Code Quilt

Why? Because I can. Because I've been fascinated with quilts like this for years. Because stuff-made-from-squares is perfect for patchwork. Because I find quilt inspiration everywhere. Because there are websites to generate QR Codes for just about anything!

Like many of my recent quilts, this one was made from T-Shirt squares ... Small ones, this time (they finish at about 2"). The QR Code is square, and I stitched it to a plush fleece blanket.

I'm just now blogging about it, but this was my brother's Christmas gift. I surprised even myself with the fact that I actually mailed it in time for Christmas.

And, of course, the cat thinks she has to inspect EVERY quilt!

Process was pretty easy ... use a free online QR Code Generator, print the resulting code as your patchwork pattern, and assemble squares ... 

This Minecraft-style quilt is almost done ...

This quilt is ready to quilt ... It's for my youngest son, who's a big fan of the Minecraft video game. (This one's made of T-Shirt fabric, backed with fleece ... Super cozy!) I find it fun to put together the bits and pieces that look not only quilt-y, but also Minecraft-y!

Just finished Shirts and Jeans Quilt

This was a fun quilt to finish up this week.

I mentioned this one a couple weeks ago ...

Jeans squares, surrounded by little colorful squares of shirt fabrics. There are 42 jeans squares, and over 800 little colorful squares!

I've made several jeans quilts (see the "Jeans" label in my blog sidebar), but this is the first one I've made that included cotton shirt fabrics. The solids, plaids, stripes, and prints add a lot to the quilt.

This quilt measures 65" x 75", so it's nice and big. It's backed with new fleece, so it's warm and cozy.

For a little while, this quilt is available for sale on eBay.

When Friday comes, I'll be linking this post to Finish It Up Friday at CrazyMomQuilts, and I'll be interested to get some more great inspiration from other quilters' finishes that are linked there.

More Jeans & T-Shirts ...

I'm quilting again ... It's a Jeans-and-Shirt Quilt this time. More details later, when I have more pictures, and a bit more time to blog.

A Blue T-Shirt Baby Quilt

Here's a just-finished baby quilt ... made from super-soft T-Shirts, and backed with cozy fleece.

Since a friend of mine recently had her fourth child -- and first boy -- I wanted the quilt to be extra boy-ish. So, I went with all-blue, and I wanted even the quilting to be distinctively "boy". 

Free-motion quilting footballs, baseballs, & basketballs all over seemed like the thing to do.

It's sort of a new take on the quilting I did on my older son's NFL Quilt, and the quilting I did on my younger son's T-Shirt Sports Quilt. 

Even though the quilt doesn't technically have borders, I quilted the outside row of squares with wiggly lines, to give a little bit of an "edge" to the quilt.

Even on the fleece, the quilting shows up well on the back of the quilt, which is neat.

I'm told that baby quilts made of T-Shirts are among the softest ones out there, and I'm hoping this one will be used and enjoyed.

I'm always glad when I 'm able to give something tangible to congratulate a friend and welcome a new baby.

Today's a great day to blog a finished quilt, because Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts has a Finish It Up Friday weekly link on her blog. I'll be linking this post there when her link-party is ready.

T-Shirt Sports Quilt - Reverse Applique & Quilt-As-You-Go

Recently, I finished this quilt for my youngest son ...

It's made of T-Shirt fabric - because T-Shirt Quilts are so fun ... and I've had fun trying my hand at Fancy T-Shirt-Quilt ideas, and Baby-Quilt T-Shirt Quilt ideas ... I decided to try my hand at the Sports-Quilt/Guy-Quilt variety of T-Shirt Quilt.

I was able to make great use of some of the T-Shirt scraps I had leftover from making T-Shirt Yarn ... and I had lots of fun trying Reverse Applique for the first time.

I also decided to use Quilt-As-You-Go techniques (modified a little), so I could work with just a small square at a time when I did the reverse-applique and the quilting.

All the fabric was cut from actual T-Shirts, except the green "sashing" strips, which were cut from a cotton jersey bed sheet.

The footballs and basketballs are my favorites ... I also included tennis balls and baseballs. And some beach balls and bouncy-balls. I sort of modified the football-quilting idea I used for my older son's NFL Quilt.

I might do a quick photo-tutorial sometime on how the reverse-applique-then-quilting went with the T-Shirt fabric. I love the fact that the T-Shirt fabrics won't fray, which helps a lot with this technique.

The picture below shows the back of the quilt -- also T-Shirt fabrics, so the quilt is super-cozy.

The whole quilt is fifty-something inches by sixty-something, so it's a nice throw-size/couch-size/kid-size quilt.

My little guy loves it, and so do I.

One of the fun things about this quilt is that I did most of the sewing on my new-to-me (Vintage, but nearly new!) Kenmore sewing machine that I got a few weeks ago for $10.00. It's an oldie but a goodie ... in really great shape, and barely (if ever) used. I love the durability and consistency of an older machine, and it's great for free-motion quilting!

I'm really pleased with how this quilt turned out.

Since this is a finish (YAY!) I'm linking this post to this week's Finish It Up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts - It's one of my all-time-favorite quilting blogs, and the weekly links for finishes are always fun and inspirational!

Two Little Quilts for Two Little Guys



Not long ago, I finished up these two little quilts.

I may have mentioned bits and pieces of these quilts in the past ... 

The one on the left showed up a few weeks ago when I posted about Playing with Orange Fabric.

 The one on the right was in progress a few months ago, and I blogged about it in a post called Another Shirt Quilt Project FMQ-QAYG-style.

These fun little quilts were gifts for my friend Christy's newest little sons.

I mentioned a few months ago (see this post) that my friend Christy would be adopting a little boy from Eastern Europe. As it turns out, God has allowed Christy and her husband to adopt TWO little boys!



So, of course, I wanted to make the little guys quilts to welcome them home.

These quilts are smallish sizes - The square one is 38" x 38", and the other one is a little narrower than that, and a little longer ... The boys are 1 and 3, but small for their ages, so I wanted quilts that would be little, but not babyish. 

Introducing my new favorite combo: Shirts and Sheets! (Perfect for Guy Quilts, if you ask me!)

The squares on this one are all cut from shirts; the beige sashing and binding was a sheet.

Putting together a Quilt-As-You-Go quilt was easier than I expected. (See more on "quilt-as-you-go" here and here and here.)

For one thing, quilting a 10½" square is SO much easier than quilting an 80" x 80" square! Because of this, I've been enjoying "the quilting" part of quilt-making a lot more lately.

For another thing, the method in this video works great for putting the pieces together.

And the orange fabric was a sheet (and so was the green on the binding & back of the orange quilt) , while the remaining triangles were all shirt fabrics.

  

I love the bright, happy look of the shirt-plaids & solids!

  

I though how fun it would be to take pictures of these quilts outside, on the clothesline.

It was windier than I thought it would be, so, not surprisingly, I ended up with a lot of this ...

... and this ... which made me laugh! I did a lot of waiting around for the wind to settle, so I could snap pics really quick before the wind picked back up!

The quilting details for the quilt-as-you-go squares were in this post.

For the triangles quilt, I decided to go with a spiral design, because I figured spirals would contrast nicely with the angular lines of the patchwork.

If you look closely at the middle spiral in the picture below, you'll see the "spiral" that's probably my favorite. Even though most of my spirals were tolerably round, and some of them were pretty near perfect, THIS one ... wasn't! I thought about taking it out and redoing ... But more and more, I realize that I'm quilting better and better. AND, more and more, I'm realizing that some things don't require stressed-out perfection. It's O.K.; it's unique. And it was made by a human, and not a robot. :-)

Speaking of favorites, I LOVE this puzzle-quilting on this block in the quilt-as-you-go quilt. Like I mentioned in other posts about this, the puzzle-quilting inspiration came from here.

Probably my very favorite block in the quilt-as-you-go quilt was this rocking-horse one, the last one I finished. Traced this little rocking-horse from a printable coloring page (I think it was this one) and added some details to make it work as a quilting design. Because the little guy getting this quilt happens to have a thing for rocking horses.

I finished off the little quilts with the boys' names ... stitching them in like the lettering I did at the end of this post and the end of this post.

Many congratulations to Christy and her family on the newest additions to their wonderful family!

The Latest Guy Quilt: NFL, Quilted with Footballs

This was fun:

Since my oldest son had a birthday recently, and since I hadn't made him a quilt in years, I needed to make a guy quilt.

When I had the idea to do something with NFL fabrics, I decided to check eBay for a deal on some team fabrics. I wasn't sure what I would find, but I figured the selection online would be pretty varied. 

Almost right away, I found a set of NFL fabrics on eBay -- precut 4" squares, two from each of the 32 NFL football teams. Perfect. Easy. (A little overpriced, maybe, but where else would I find all 32 fabrics in one place!?)

Pretty quickly, I decided what to do with 64 squares (+1 extra solid square) -- A basic Single Irish Chain layout. 

Simple. No frills. Guy quilt.

I added a border row above and below, made with shirt-cottons (solids, stripes, plaids) to add some length to make a nice-sized throw quilt. (It's about 55" x 68".)

The fabric combo turned out nice (brown cotton sheet fabric for the top, and something fuzzy-textured-warm for the backing). My favorite thing is how the quilting turned out.

Free-motion meander with FOOTBALLS quilted in! This was so fun, and surprisingly, not too complicated.

Maybe I'll take some more pics and do a picture tutorial on the FMQ footballs sometime. (I was surprised at how little I found online about how to quilt football designs into a quilt! I found a couple of ways that it works.)

Anyway. This was fun. And my son loves it. I'm happy about that.