on quilting a treasure, and WIP Wednesday

One afternoon when I was about 16, I was rooting around in my grandmother's closet, probably bored and looking for a project, and found a box of fabric. Amazingly, the fabric I found turned out to be remnants from clothes my grandmother had made over the years, and most of those clothes were for me! Some of the remnants were more than a decade old since I could remember having dresses made out of several of the pastel fabrics when I was in kindergarten or first grade. She had no plans to make anything from these remnants so I asked if I could have them. I then painstakingly cut out 5 inch squares every day on my long car ride to and from school.

When I graduated from high school, I had finished my very first quilt. I still treasure this quilt, less because it's the first one I made and more because I have so many memories attached to these fabrics. I can remember falling in love with the black fabric with peach roses and the skirt Granny made from it. I can remember the jumper I had made from the wild and feathered tan, purple and aqua fabric that no one liked but me. I can remember the shorts made from the light blue striped fabric, and the jumper with the pastel kitties and bunnies, and the dress from purple calico. Nearly every piece of fabric is woven from my history and is now used to warm my family and houseguests. Quite a treasure, indeed.

Since so many of the early clothes Granny made me were pastel, I had enough pastel fabrics leftover for another quilt. This became my third quilt, and the last quilt I completed. It became Elizabeth's baby quilt.

With many soft pastels of my youth and cozy flannel on the underside, Elizabeth used this quilt daily for the first several years of her life, including dragging it to preschool for use in her daily naptime.

Although this quilt is now largely used to aid in fort building, the corners still bear the years of use when Elizabeth used to suck on her quilt while falling asleep. Her quilt is now faded and worn with the love she bestowed upon her treasured blanket.

When Finn transitioned to his new big boy bed last winter, he began asking for a blanket with cars on it. I'm sure that wouldn't have been a tall order to fill at nearly any store, but I thought it might be time to make another quilt. I know I'm not likely to make a log cabin or pinwheel quilt anytime in the near future, but I can make a quilt with cars. And clearly, I can make treasures.

So I set to work scouring my stash for leftover car fabrics and searching through etsy for prints I thought Finn might like. I found a few Alexander Henry, Michael Miller, Riley Blake and a few random Japanese prints. Slowly, a variety of colors and types of cars, trucks, buses and vans emerged.

And eventually, I managed to get all of my 11 inch squares cut, all 63, to make a 70" x 90" quilt which should fit nicely on Finn's twin size bed. This is definitely still a work in progress. I have all the blocks sewn into strips and plan to sew the strips into the quilt top in the next day or two. Only today did I decide exactly which flannel I wanted for the back of the quilt and order it so there is still much work to be done.

But I'm already so excited for my little boy to open his gift on Christmas morning. Somehow I know it's destined to be a treasure.

And now, trailing on the heels of Finn's quilt is this little bed, picked out at our local farmer's market as just the right size of a certain American Girl who lives in Elizabeth's room and currently sleeps on a pillow beside Elizabeth's bed.

She might need a quilt too, don't you think?