My T-shirt Quilt is Done!

What is black and white and sleeps on quilts?

Conan!

With Gwen's final Beaver Island Quilt Retreat coming up, I thought I should finish up a few projects I started at the retreats. I found my t-shirt quilt, all sandwiched and basted, ready to be quilted. I never got around to quilting it as I just didn't know how to quilt it. For 3 years it was in the cupboard...so just to finish it, I went with some simple "organic line quilting". All of wednesday I spent machine quilting, took a break, came back and there is Conan all curled up snoozin'! so cute! working on the binding hoping to finish it tonight!

BIQR 2010 What is black and white, and red all over?

My T-shirt Quilt!

I have seen many black, white and red quilts that have really caught my eye and then one day I got the brilliant idea to convert my old t-shirts, which were primarily all black, white and red, into one of these quilts. Then going through the Collaborative Quiltmaking books I figured the parts department was the best way to construct blocks around these shirts, and I got 2 of these made about..oh... 6 months ago and then nothing...in the mean time I started collecting black, white and red fabrics and throwing them in a bag with the t-shirts.

Then while thinking about getting ready for BIQR, I resurrected the idea and decided to bring them with me to the retreat to work on.

At the retreat many of us talked about the influence of African-american quilts and the quilts of Gee's Bend on liberated quiltmaking. This reminded me that I neatly cut all my shirts into perfect squares and maybe I needed to shake this up with a reminder that these were once t-shirts. So I decided to leave the neckline in my Wonder Woman shirt. I also recreated a 'w' using the zig-zag border technique (that's one of my favourite borders!). I also introduced a new colour: yellow....

wow. I think I went a little crazy with that block and I didn't know what to do after that. So Christine and I went shopping. :) I found this really nice black and white floral Bethany Reynolds Stack-n-whack fabric. I added it to my Love Fights t-shirt block,

and my Ruby Gloom t-shirt block,

and my Trailer Park Boys t-shirt block.

I added some sawtooth to my Supergirl t-shirt block,

and went a little 'broken dishes' with my Emily the Strange: Split Purrsonality t-shirt.

In total, I ended up with 9 blocks. I put the Wonder Woman in the middle. I needed to go shopping again! I need some black!

but still, 9 blocks makes a square lap quilt...maybe I should put a red inner border and more black on the outside? but it still will be square. I had to sleep on it. Each night at the retreat before I went to sleep I would flip through one of Gwen's books, absorbing the ideas.

And there it was on 158 page in the original Liberated Quiltmaking book, Red Square! Red squares all floating on a white background, but mine will be a black background and I will just have a row at the top and one at the bottom!

For an added touch, I particularly liked my Emily t-shirts because they even had nice tags, I saved those and added them to the quilt top.

The one below says, "Join the Posse: Emilystrange.com"

The sides of the shirts always had these cat eyes tags, which I really liked.

Ah. Now it is done. All I have to do is quilt as desired :P

BIQR 2008 part 3: Meet and Greet

On Wednesday evening, we all got together for pizza in the wicker room for our Meet and Greet. Everyone was asked to bring something for show and tell to introduce ourselves to the group. Since many of the attendees had been to past retreats, many of them brought stuff they had worked on at those retreats. I am not going to show you all the wonderful quilts shown, but focus instead on those from the Liberated Basket retreat, since there were a fair number of them.

I finally got to meet MJ in Michigan in person, I had met her in Lazy Gal's First Ever On-Line Class. She took what she practiced there and applied to Gwen's Liberated Baskets and came up with this beauty:


Joyce insisted she had failed liberated baskets and when she got home she took hers apart and created this lovely folk art piece dedicated to her grandson. Her grandson is blind and says frequently, "Can you hear the birds?"

Joanne's liberated baskets:




If I remember the story correctly, Sylvia had quite a few of these large basket blocks and didn't know what to do with them. Gwen's retreat inspired this arrangement, front:


back:



more Liberated baskets:


OK, the next one wasn't from a Gwen retreat, but you know how I like quilts and things made from t-shirts and it does contain some liberated piecing...This one was made for a husband out of his racing t-shirts, and do you know what his reaction was? " Don't you know, hon, you can't mix Formula One and Nascar!"


Next post: Creating with Solids