Dalton's Quilt!

Last weekend I drove to "the cities" (near Minneapolis) and stayed with my sister in law Carla for the weekend.  Her husband and youngest son were in Kansas City to a race.  They race (I think) stock cars and are gone a lot of weekends, so this was the perfect time to get Grandma Arvilla's quilt done for a grandson graduating this spring.  Grandma passed away 2 years ago now, and had two quilts started for the last two grandkids to graduate.  Dalton graduates this spring, and it will be 4 years before his younger sister and the last grandchild graduates. 

Grandma had the top and bottom all sewn on this quilt, so all we needed to do was to get the batting and tie the quilt, and sew the binding.  My house doesn't have any rooms big enough to put up a quilt rack or to have room to work with it on the floor; but Carla does.  I just couldn't borrow a quilt rack and haul it with, so we did the best we could on the floor.  Got there about 7:30 pm Friday evening.  We sat and visited until it was getting late, and decided we'd better get some sleep and start on the quilt Saturday morning.

Saturday morning when we got up, instead of starting to sew right away, we went to several garage sales. Just can't pass up going to garage sales in a bigger city environment!   love it!!!!  Got some good deals too.  Got back to the house about 10 am and got busy.

Step one was to iron the bottom, lay it on the floor, then the batting and then the top of the quilt.  Grandma used double knit for the top, and there was a lot of stretch, so we started from the middle, and safety pinned the quilt through all the layers to stabilize it.  Then we started tying it, but didn't do it on every corner because the squares were about 3 or 4 inches square.  We tied it on every big square corner, and then if that square was a bigger one, we tied it in the middle.  After trimming the batting, we rolled the backing up and under for the binding, and making mitered corners.  That worked out well.  Then we added more ties on the outside edge of the quilt near the binding stitching.  I didn't dare sew the binding on my machine because the double knit on some of the colors had so much give that I thought my machine would bunch things up.  So we hand sewed the binding.  Not hard to do; it just took time.  I always do it so you can't see any stitches.  What's so unique about Grandma's quilts is the fact that she didn't go out a buy new material.  She did with what she had.  The backing on this quilt is two twin top sheets together, but she still didn't have enough material, so she sewed a darker brown around the edge, and that material didn't make it all the way either, so she substituted with adding a darker brown flannel at the corners!  Dalton will definately know it was from Grandma!

     

I think I'll start working on the other quilt this winter.  That one is in different shades of purples and white double knit.  I wonder where she got all this double knit material.  Grandma only has a few of the squares cut out on the purples, so that quilt will basically get all done by me and the sisters in laws.  So I'll get to decide how to piece it all together.  I hope that Grandma enjoyed watching Carla and I finish the one we just did.  I'm sure Dalton will just love it; knowing that Grandma had started it for him.