My Father's Shirts

I believe this is my biggest project to accomplish so far. David Wright passed away is 2007 and I was asked to make a quilt using his shirts for his son Christopher and his daughter Emily. I have finally completed the quilt for Christopher and it took me about 2 years! This quilt was made using Davids work shirts and polo shirts with a few of his t-shirts as the main fabric in the stars and square blocks. I also added personalized embroidery is some of the squares as he was a soccer coach and an avid golfer. Since I wanted to use as much of the shirts as I could I took the cuffs complete with the buttons attached and sewed them all around the boarder of the quilt and I'm planning to use the collars of the shirts around the boarder of Emily's quilt.


I did one embroidery square for Christopher's birth date and the memorial square with David's dates of birth and death.

The biggest challenge for this quilt was the fact I quilted it on my regular sewing machine, but due to the size of the quilt (100 x 100) I had to use my dinning room table and draped the quilt over the table, the chairs,and my shoulder while I was free motion quilting. I had to quilt a little at a time because my shoulders and back would start aching after a while! My next step is to make a quilt for Emily, but fortunately this one sill be a smaller size. I'm almost done designing her quilt on graft paper and I'm about ready to start cutting and embroidering. Sine I'll soon be retired I'm confident her quilt will be done a lot sooner than two years from now!!


Last year because I was feeling so bad about not getting anything done for her I made a pillow from some of the shirt scraps left after cutting the squares of Christopher's quilt. I entered it in the Platte County Fair and was thrilled to get a blue ribbon. When I gave Emily the quilt I let her have the ribbon since I felt it went with the pillow. However, she had other ideas and decoupaged the ribbon onto an old small wooded ironing board I had asked her to decorate for me.