Grandma's Aprons

 Today I officially started the apron quilt. I'm excited about this one because of it's emotional significance. When Grandpa Great died almost two years ago, my mother in law decided to put her mother in an assisted living center so she could get the care she needed. That meant cleaning out her mother's home and selling it to help pay for the assisted living. In the cleaning out process, we came across these old aprons of Grandma Greats and because they were so old and worn, they got tossed in the dumpster. Well, I jumped right in and pulled them out of the garbage and snuck them into my car.

I knew when I pulled them out of the garbage that I wanted to make a quilt out of them, but it wasn't until now that I decided it was time. My mother in law has a hard life. She works full time, cares for her husband who is physically disabled and struggles with mental illness, and she cares for her mother, the one time owner of these aprons. She's a great woman and with her birthday coming up at the end of March, I thought now was the time to make her gift. A quilt made from her mother's old aprons.

I looked for just the right pattern and settled on this one .... pixelated heart, from the Robert Kaufman website ... I liked that it was simple and I liked that it would portray love. The process started with deconstructing the aprons and getting them ironed .... it was fun to have little cracker crumbs fall out of the pockets and when I ironed them, they smelled like Grandma Great.

Some of them were pretty worn, and I knew I wanted to keep some of that unique stuff in the quilt ... like this patch.

And some of the aprons were so worn that I ironed on a featherweight interface to stabilize them a bit better so they'd last longer in the quilt.

Then I got to cutting. I decided on 4" squares.

Here's a few of the squares with the apron details I wanted to keep. I love them!

My lovely little stack of 4" apron squares.

Then I started laying them out. I'm excited to see this come together!

Quilts 3, 4, 5 ... And Maybe 6

I started quilt 3 from a kit I bought at K&H Quilt Shoppe. It's from a pattern called All A Flutter by Bonnie of the Cotton Way.  The fabrics are from one of my all time favorite fabric collections, Happy Go Lucky, by Bonnie's daughter Camille. You can find it at the Fat Quarter Shop. I just love every single fabric and tone in this collection. All I have left to do is cut the white on white and I'll be ready to start assembly!

Quilt #4 belongs to my son ... we searched high and low to find a pattern he liked and it wasn't until I went to my first guild meeting where I met Caroline Friedlander at her trunk show that we found the perfect pattern, Aeriel! So we set out to our local quilt shop to see what we could find for fabrics. I told him he could choose whatever he wanted for the quilt, and that it would be his job to put the color combinations together when it was time to sew. He's excited about it, I'm a little nervous ... I'm finding it hard to give up creative control and just let him choose what he likes. :) Regardless, he found some fabrics he loved and after I get the templates from the pattern copied, I'll be ready to learn to paper piece!!

 Quilt #5 will probably be the one that gets finished first .... it's a gift for my mother in law and her birthday is coming up. I'll be cutting up her mothers old aprons and making this darling heart quilt I found in the Robert Kaufman free patterns!

 

And then, quilt 6 kind of accidentally happened. It really came down to the fact that I didn't want to watch the Superbowl, but I live in a razed Superbowl family ... so I decided to give a little english paper piecing a try ... and I'm hooked!! I love it! My goal is to make at least a twin size quilt without buying ANY fabric for it. Everything will be made with scraps. What I'd really love to do is somehow reach out to the quilting world and see if other quilters would be willing to send me some of their little square scraps so it could have a little more specialness to it :) We'll see if that works out or not!  Either way, I have plenty to do and am having SO MUCH FUN quilting, meeting new quilters, learning new things and feeling creative again!!