Crib quilt based on child's painting

Several months ago, a very dear niece of mine requested a very special quilt for her baby due in November. She asked if I could make a quilt for her new baby based on a painting done by her husband's little sister Gracie, shortly before Gracie died of a brain tumor at age 8. The plan is to use the painting as a focal point in the nursery. Here is a picture of the painting and since I have never seen the actual painting - this is what I had to base the quilt on.

Now, I am not an art quilter. I like traditional patterns and traditional fabrics. I live 1930's reproduction fabrics as well as civil war type fabrics. I don't have a single piece of boldly colored fabric in my whole stash.

So, the first thing I needed to do was to ask my on-line quilting friends for advice. Then I asked a few of my local quilting friends. And then I went shopping.

There is a wonderful little quilt shop down the road from me run by a delightful little Amish lady. She has shelf after shelf of beautiful batiks for less than $5 per yard! What a find! The name of the shop is Miner Road Fabrics and it is just outside of Carson City, Michigan. She doesn't have an on-line shop and I can only envision her taking mail orders to the post office by horse and buggy! This is definitely a "visit in person" kind of shop!

I thought I needed to use batiks to get the rich, full colors as well as the depth and movement that batiks give. Once I had the fabric that I thought would work, I agonized about the design. As I said - art is not my forte! I finally decided to just mimic the drawing. I hope both mommy and baby will love the finished quilt.

Red Wings T-Shirt quilt

This gorgeous t-shirt throw used to be my brother-in-law's collection of Detroit Red Wings Hockey t-shirts. I hope he is going to love it! He gave me the big bag full of t-shirts this last spring and told me to "do what you do as soon as you can stand long enough to work on it" to make it into a quilt.

Now that I am standing for longer periods of time - up to an hour or so - and as long as I take frequent breaks to elevate my leg, I am able to work on projects like this. As a little side note - the edges on this quilt are NOT that wavy. I should have taken more time to straighten out the quilt before I took the picture. :-)


I also got a chance to give my little granddaughter the Molly Mine purse that I made with my embroidery machine. It was truly a big hit. She never put it down all day. She even took it with her to the Detroit Tiger baseball game that night. The gate person asked to look through MY bag when we entered the stadium. When he asked her if he could look at her bag, so responded, "no thank you".

And, her mother tells me that she slept with it as well as bringing it down with her in the morning. That makes it all worth while!