On January 4, 2012 my childhood home, the last house I lived in with both my mom and dad burned to the ground.
It was so hard to be several states away, but I did what I could. I made quilts for my dad, stepmom, and brother. The best part was that generous quilters from around the world wanted to help.
On election night of this year, a high school friend lost her house to fire. She has two children at home. Her son, age 10, lost everything.
I knew I would make him a quilt. I had my eye on a Minion quilt I had seen made by Elizabeth Dackson of Don't Call Me Betsy. It was on my to do queue just waiting for tell me who needed it. When another high school friend told me that Tina's son loved Minions, I knew that he was the one to receive it.
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God is clearly in the details because one of the women in my quilting group had just given me a huge bag of 2" squares from her scraps. It save me hours of trimming my scraps and added variety to my squares.
Elizabeth doesn't have a pattern for sale so I reverse engineered the pattern on Electric Quilt 7, which I had just ordered as an (early) Christmas gift to myself. The only thing I added was the mouth.
I divided the pattern into blocks and used the same method to piece the squares using fusible interfacing as I did with the big Trinity Celtic Knot quilt I made this summer. I saved a lot of time by making my squares on a piece of cardboard instead of each square of interfacing.
I love this method, though it can get pretty messing using scraps instead of strips.
Other than cleaning up the mess, it went together quickly.
For quilting, I made one big spiral. I had a little more trouble keeping my stitches even, but practice will make perfect. It was fun to see my scraps as I worked and to remember the projects I made with them. In this picture, I see scraps from a fidget, a quilt I made for our son's first grade teacher, Timur's Russian Heart, my around the world baby quilt, my sister's Love Bird quilt, my son's tooth fairy pillow, and my husband's shirt.
I was working on this quilt at the same time as the Tool Tattoo quilt. While I was waiting for some fabric to come in, I made the binding. Usually I make the binding just before I need it, so I don't need to worry about keeping the roll together. This time, I did, so I used a couple of pins. My son saw the pins, as well as one of the neat rolls I picked up at a quilt show, and decided it would work better. His 7-year-old mind is always working! I think I'm going to order some old school slap bracelets to keep some other things together. I think I'll be great for rolling quilts as I'm quilting, too.
This was a fun label to make. I hope Colton likes it!
Speaking of my own sweet boy, he still loves to "wrap the love" in my quilts. It's the last step as we pray over the person receiving the quilt.
The minion will be staying with us for a little bit until I finish the quilt for Tina's daughter. I'm a little delayed after slicing a 4cm gash through my finger this week.
It's really hard not to sew but I'm really in too much pain to do much anyway. So we will enjoy the minion, celebrate our son's birthday, and rest together as I heal.
To see more pictures of this quilt in progress, look for #coltonsminionquilt on Instagram. If you'd like to see what I'm currently working on, follow me at de Jong Dream House.
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What a great quilt for that little guy - I bet he'll be thrilled after so much loss. Since you're finger hinders quilting, maybe you can spend time playing with EQ7 - it's such a great program! Thanks for linking up the Minion at Midweek Makers
ReplyDeleteThis is going to be so loved by this little boy. Love it!!
ReplyDeleteThank you for this wonderful story but we only put one link up per month into the hat for prizes to give everyone an equal chance. I hope you will keep linking wih us once a month in future. Hope your finger heals quickly.
ReplyDeleteI love minions, very fun quilt! I like the "in progress" pictures where we can see the minion grow! :) Thanks for sharing and I hope your finger is better!!
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