See What’s Cooking at Creating Quilts:

Hello Friends!

It’s September, and business is hopping!

One of my beginning-of-the-month exercises is to update my customer board.

This whiteboard lists my CREATE quilts, REPAIR quilts, and K’s PROJECTS. (If you are wondering, K’s Projects take longer to complete.)

My CREATE projects include a two-sided quilt for a mother who wishes to give her daughter a t-shirt quilt with all her swim meet t-shirts. The top side will use all the high school shirts (20 total); the backside will use all the college swim team shirts (15 total). As a previous swimmer, this project fondly reminds me of my swim team days!

Another CREATE project comes from a mother who wants to gift her daughter a memory quilt using her theater-themed T-shirts. The daughter currently teaches theater at a university. She loves Victorian and Edwardian decor and asks me to create a quilt to fit that style. 

The third CREATE project is from a daughter who wishes to create a baby quilt from her parent’s shirts for their first great-grandchild. The shirts are a beautiful assortment of colors and textures, making for a fun quilt! Additionally, she requests a memory cat made from the shirt scraps. 

The REPAIR projects are rolling in this year! There are lots of unique repair projects to work on.

A grandson wants his grandmother’s quilt repaired with fabrics collected from other family members, including aunts, uncles, and other grandchildren. The original fabrics are dated from the 1970s and 1980s.

A woman brought me two projects: the first is to convert a duvet into a quilt for her 10-year-old son, and the second is to repair a quilt handed down from her grandmother. The Colonial Lady pattern dates from the 1920s to the 1930s. Her quilt uses fabrics from the 1970s and has several worn stitches and torn fabric.

Another woman delivered a favorite store-bought quilt with several loose seams and worn blocks. The colors are earthy red, gold, and cream, with a bit of green. This one is well-loved and will stitch up quickly.

A quilt collector brought in a quilt she bought from eBay, which had binding damage throughout. She wanted a “quick fix,” and I suggested making the repairs closest to the maker’s intent. Most of the quilt was machine-stitched, with the binding the only hand-stitched part. The owner liked my suggestions, and we decided hand-stitching the binding would be best. 

Each quilt, whether in the CREATE or the REPAIR category, brings me great joy! I love them all. Between customer quilts, I spend a little time on my projects (K’s Projects). Two big ones are challenges from my quilt guild. One is a scrap challenge where I deconstructed one of my previous quilt tops to build a dimensional art quilt. The second challenge is an improvisational row quilt in which we create each row using traditional block themes. I’m adding a personal challenge by making each row a separate color.

Any way you stitch it, I’m having fun with all my projects!

Kristen