A quilt for Tige

Jamie brought over fabric for a military quilt for Tige's birthday. She said I could do whatever I wanted for a pattern (yaaay) and quilt however I wanted (double yaaay). It turned out so great! More later.

Alterations were in order

Dahlia started pre-school this week. She has twenty students in her class. Six girls in her class have this same backpack, and all over the rec center were little girls with this backpack. I couldn't send Dahlia to school and expect her to bring the right one home every night. So I trimmed the edges with pink feathers and added buttons on the front to look like jewels. I ran ribbon down both straps so she would know which one was hers from both sides. "It's Fabulous" she said, in her princess voice. Yaaaay!
Lining up for pre-school, I heard a mom ooooh over my backpack with her friend. Double yaaaay!

Iysha's Tesselation

This year's Quilt of Dreams quilt was influenced by a number of factors. First, as I was getting ready to look at the fabric, a 2 year old girl passed away in our old ward. I wasn't really close to her family but her story really affected me. I have never named a quilt after a person before, this is the first one. These are all the things she could have learned and I loved the idea that this was a quilt of knowledge. I began selecting blues and purples representing water and the sky. I decided on a tesselated pattern that really had a lot of movement to the eye.
The next factor was looking at the dreams of the children. A few of them said that their dream was to go to high school. I started thinking that I could put high school into the quilt. I doodled and looked up references for things from high school. I made a list of subjects and started filling in information you would learn and fun things about high school. I ended up with more than I thought and a lot of fun things went into this quilt.
Biology - a plant and an animal cell, a heart
Chemistry - part of the periodic table
Math - the tesselation, also acute, obtuse and right angles.
Art - a pre-raphaelite painting by Millais (thanks for the book Dad)
P.E. - footballs, baseball and a badminton set.
History - I put three WWII planes a British Hawker Hurricane, a Japanese Zero and a U.S. P-61 Black Widow. I also wrote about the Berlin wall. There is also, and this was for my mom, Charlamagnes throne.
German - a few words
English - a quote from Shakespeare and one from Charles Dickens.
I also put in a locker and some fun things about high school.

Around the edges was a list of classes and also a list of some clubs from school.
In the end the quilting turned out to be more what I did in high school so at the very bottom I put FIS class of 92. I had a lot of fun making this quilt and it became very personal.

The Finished Product and the aftermath.......

So the quilt is wrapped and ready to go out the door. I took a photo and looked up at my sewing table strewn with little bits of fabric and even the ball of tape that was used when I sewed in the straight lines on the pillow shams. What a mess, but what fun it was!

Four Alarm Frenzy? Fire It Up? Oh I can't decide!!!

This is quilt number 2 for Mrs. Thompson. She is having another boy and using the same fabric I needed to make another quilt, different enough that they would be able to tell them apart. The first one was all fire trucks and the quilting was all fire trucks. This time I quilted flames into the quilt. So the first one was TFD#1 (the fire department) and this one is the fire. I hope that it isn't indicative of their personalities. This one is backed in red, and the other in blue so there should be no question as to which is which. She also asked for a pillow sham, so I made two because there will be two boys and I've learned from experience that they argue over things and they will both need one.

Here's the message I attached to the quilt:

I made the plain sham first, and then realized that my boys fight over everything and if there was one there had to be two. I found some scraps from the last quilt and used those to make the second sham – which actually matches the first quilt nicely. This way there are two quilts and two shams. When I made the first quilt the fire trucks were very much in my mind, this time it was the fire. I made flames and little fires all over the quilt. When I was done I realized that this really reflected my boys personalities, the fire and the one who puts them out. Thanks so much! It was so fun to work with the same fabric and do something completely different with it. I hope you love it as much as I do!