Monthly Archives: September 2023

Wedding Flowers :)

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I made these for my friend and her husband, based on their “Save the Date” stationery 🙂 it was super fun to revisit the wired slips technique and bring these flowers to the third dimension.

My reference! I was originally planning to do all the flowers here, plus one from the front of the invitation, but I decided to invest my time in doing three flowers well and being patient with the color blending.

I made three different flowers; one with 5 petals (the one on the right), one with 7 petals (in the middle), and one with 20 petals (bottom left). I wanted to have different colors and textures across the flowers, and different petal shapes. The 5-petal flower has teardrop petals that come to a point, the 7-petal flower has petals with flat tops, and the 20-petal flower has rectangular heart shaped petals.

Working around the border of a petal with buttonhole stitch
Top: back of petals that are cut out and ready; Bottom: leaves still on the hoop

I poked the petals into one layer of fabric and folded the ends up, then embroidered the center stamens and pistils onto the fabric and anchored the petals to the fabric. Then I added in the leaves and made tiny stitches between petals and leaves and into the base fabric to secure all the elements together. I added another layer of fabric underneath the base fabric for some structural stability, and glued the entire assembly to a square canvas. The plain background ended up too plain, so I added some watercolor to the background to spruce it up and give it the idea of more leaves in the distance.

Project completed September 2023.

Celebratory T-Shirt Quilt

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I made this quilt as a commission for my friend’s mom, for my friend 🙂 Their mom supplied me with a bunch of t-shirts from my friend’s childhood that otherwise weren’t being used, and I got to work!

First, the idea was to have these shirts in a different format that my friend could actually appreciate and use. I did an inventory of the shirts, most of which only had designs on the front, but some had a front and back design. There were a couple repeats, so I figured I could put them in different areas on the quilt or exclude them, depending on how many squares I needed. Below I’ve included some of the calculations I did for this quilt – I had about 50 things I could make into squares, so I thought about different grids and calculated the dimensions for each. I settled on a 6 by 7 grid using 13.5″ squares, with a 3″ border for the quilt top (on the right of the picture).

For the back, their mom and I decided on a three colors in a stripe format, and I had to figure out what the widths of each panel would be. I thought about doing the stripes on a diagonal, but the math just didn’t work out that way (bottom left). I ended up doing straight stripes with a 6″ border (bottom right), using the same fabric for all the borders and the binding.

I think one of the main calculations I do for quilts is trying to figure out the correct aspect ratio, based on the square shape, the desired size, and the border. I also wanted to make sure the three stripe colors were equally represented; I originally thought the seams could be diagonal but I found I wouldn’t have enough fabric.

Then it was time to start cutting squares! I cut them out and lined them up in the order I wanted to sew them into the grid; I sewed the squares into columns and then the columns into the entire quilt top.

Lined up squares and the friendly helper!

After constructing the quilt top, I added some borders – to add size to the quilt and to stabilize the entire thing. Most of the shirts were made of stretchy woven fabric (honestly, very difficult to sew, I had to use tissue paper to make the edges stay flat so I could piece them together) so I wanted to have that non-stretch cotton around the edges to lock everything together.

I quilted the whole thing with zigzags across the row seams, and then went back to do some wiggly lines up and down and around the different designs to stabilize and add some fun.

Project completed February 2022