Color a Quilt!

This blog post is pretty much a day late and a dollar short, but my sewing friends have been dying to see this, so I thought I would post about it anyway. This is the giant quilt I made for my sister and new brother-in-law! I can't even tell you how much fun it was to make. 

The squares around the middle are pictures that were drawn about Torri and Taylor together. The squares towards the top of the quilt are pictures from Taylor's childhood, and the bottom ones are pictures from Torri's childhood. It was so fun to talk to my family and decide what are some of our favorite memories of Torri!

This is a tutorial on how to do the lettering found in the center. My Aunt Sue taught me and as you have read before, she's a genius! :)

I picked the saying, "Loves changes everything" because Torri has said that many times about Taylor. I printed off the saying just on printer paper, then I used a light box to pencil it onto my fabric. Make sure you know where your center is so that you can get your saying lined up the right way. 

Here's how it looked once it was all penciled on. 

On the back, I safety-pinned some batting so that the string would have something to hold onto. 

Next, I just hand stitched with black thread all the way around the letters, just following my pencil line. This part took me the longest, but I'm not super fast at it yet. Sue always machine stitches hers, but her machine has a slow setting so it makes it much easier. My machine has just one setting, and it made it pretty hard. So hand stitching it was! 

After you are done hand-stitching, you just need to grab a black sharpie and fill it in! It's really easy because the sharpie pretty much stays within your stitch lines. 

I asked my family what were some of their favorite memories of Torri. One thing that we all mentioned was when she dressed up as "Beth" from "Dawg the Bounty Hunter" for Halloween! And our endless beanie babies was another fun memory. 

Torri was in the room with us when we had Weston, so I traced his hands and put it on a square. Weston is her first nephew, so I thought it was fitting. I thought that this would also be a really cute gift for a grandparent. You could trace all their grandchildren's hands and have each of them draw a picture. 

Other things that make it more personal are taking actual pictures of them and making it into a quilt drawing. This was from the first time they vacationed together. I just made it a more simple version. 

If you want to do a quilt drawing, follow my instructions found in this post. One thing that I would pass on from what I learned with this quilt is to graph out your quilt before you start to do it. I usually only make smaller blankets, and with those I just wing it. Big quilts must be planned! Sue always uses graph paper to plan her quilts, and it works perfect. 

Here's a few pictures from the day because it was just so pretty!! 

(Photos by the amazing Haley Hodges)

The bow tie... kills me!! Weston was 7 months old. 

And just in case you are wondering... Steven was a rockin' minister! I kept telling Torri that her minister was so hot that I was going to have an affair with him.. hehe! :)

Happy quilting!