Tayta's College Quilt

My blog posts are all out of order now, but oh well. I was so happy to completely finish Tayta's happy quilt before traveling to the US last July. That is why it is my happy quilt. Tayta calls it her happy quilt because it makes her happy to look at it.

When we began considering patterns for her college quilt, I showed her this pattern in one of my quilting books: 

One of authors, Amanda Jean Nyberg, who blogs at Crazy Mom Quilts , is the quilter who first inspired me to pick up quilting again, by introducing me to the world of modern scrap quilting.

Tayta, with some imput from Artist Son and Me, chose the fabrics from my stash of scraps. Represented in the quilt are clothes from most family members: a shirt of Active Sons, dresses and tops from Oldest Daughter and Tayta, fabric from a dress I made for myself over 25 years ago, a shirt of Dear Husbands, and leftover scraps from Artist Son's college quilt. Tayta did a lot of the laying out of squares, with minimal help from me, and I did the sewing and construction--such a fun project to work on together!

For the back of Tayta's quilt, I used a vintage cotton duvet cover that I found in the used market. It didn't provide quite enough backing fabric, so I improvised by adding in scraps left over from the front. I first added the wide strip, thinking it would be enough, but it wasn't, so I added the cross strip as well. The binding was fashioned from, of course, more scraps. I machine quilted the quilt using a diagonal pattern and I used two-inch wide masking tape as a guide for the stitching lines.

Here is Tayta looking happy about her quilt in the olive grove near our home. Beautiful olive trees are one of the enduring favorite things of Tayta's childhood, so she thought the olive grove the perfect place for a quilt photo-shoot.

I am in awe of people who quilt as a business. I enjoyed making this quilt, but it took me a long time! If I had to put a price tag on it, either my hourly wage would be very, very low or the quilt would cost much more than I could actually sell it for! And that isn't even with considerations of it's imperfections (i.e. mistakes). 

Next quilt? I'm not sure. I need to find my inspiration. I think I'll work on some smaller projects first...