How To Make A Memory Quilt | Turning Old Clothing Into Comfort

hello and welcome to the resourceful woman i took a week off i just have been so over it with covid and pandemic and lockdown and missing people and missing places and i just fell into a bit of a slump and i wasn't particularly productive for a little while and another reason that this video is coming to you after a week's extra silence is because i'm sharing with you something that has been a long time in coming i started this project uh before i think i ever started this channel and i'm still far from finished on it this is a project making four to five quilts for a family who lost a loved one um memory quilts out of this gentleman's shirts um i have completed one quilt in a year and a bit that i've been working on these i have a lot more to go but i am going to walk you through some of the steps and the thinking and kind of what i was getting up to as i was making this um and you'll see as well the designs and and layouts and kind of what's to come with the other quilts that i'll be making although i doubt that i will film the rest of them or share them later that would just be kind of redundant um i'll share a little bit more on this gentleman who passed away and how much his family means to me uh at the end of this video but for right now um i'll just kind of get into it every memory quilt is going to be as different and as unique as the person in whose memory it is made you can look online and find lots of examples of quilts and throw cushions teddy bears and all kinds of things that people have made but your design is going to come down to the exact materials that you have on hand and how you wish to showcase them [Music] i myself i started with 17 shirts many of them were variations of a blue check pattern with a few pinks thrown in in some ways this made this project very easy because this wardrobe was fairly consistent so it was easy to find ways to match the patterns and find what worked together as well when my friend and i were working on these we decided to stick to a very simple layout of just kind of checks and squares small squares and large squares we didn't go into super drastic shapes and patterns and like really fancy quilting it is possible to do but we decided uh for this project to keep it fairly simple straightforward to make it easier to make but also to sort of preserve the the shirtiness of the shirts um which you'll see in a little bit we started off thinking that we would try to include some of every shirt into five quilts um you could see in the original drawing that that was what was intended much later down the line when we had cut up all the pieces we started to do layouts and we figured out that this was the wrong approach that limiting each quilt to four to five prints was a better way of achieving a more aesthetically pleasing outcome the first thing we did was cut up all of the shirts into broad flat pieces of material removing the collars yolks and cuffs i kept the shirt fronts intact and buttoned which you'll see a little bit later it's pretty impressive how much material you can get from a single sleeve [Music] from there with a vague idea of how big we wanted to make the quilts we could estimate how many squares we would need and what sizes they would need to be looking at how much material came from all of the cut up shirts we began to feel more confident about how much could be produced from what we had after cutting everything into squares we played around with combinations of colors and patterns and figured out how best to get the best look for each individual quilt after that i marked out where the sewing line should be to make sure that each square was the exact same dimensions as the next square that it was meant to be sewn to and obviously with the smaller squares they all had to be sewn together into larger squares so when a square is even a little bit off in measurements it can throw off a whole row and make the sashing strips not line up as you go further along the more you know slightly off measurements you get the more difficulties you're going to have and having a nice tidy quilt in the end i cut the sashing strips into one inch widths with half inch seam allowance all around i started by connecting the squares into long strips with short sashing strips in between i then connected all of those long strips with long sashing strips in between i set up my materials so that i could measure cut sew and press continuously making all of these very repetitive steps go faster here are a couple of photos of the work in progress you'll see that in many places i maintained the cuff tailoring or used both sides of the shirt front button together or the breast pocket this was a very personal decision that we made together so that some of the shirt qualities would remain in the quilt form reminding the owner more of the person who used to wear these pieces with the strips all assembled into a quilt top i ran another sashing strip around the outside then measured up batting and backing material i pinned the three layers together that is quilt top batting and backing and then quilted in the ditch there were several considerations to my choice of quilting method one i'm not massively experienced at quilting so the simpler the better i love all of the designs i see online but i don't think i'm equal to some of the more fancy things just yet two these quilts are about the memories of a person not about my quilting skills so better to leave the fabrics as close to intact as possible and not cover them with a bunch of design quilting work and finally as i had left a lot of buttons and and cuff pieces and things in place doing fancy loops and curlicues and the quilting would have very quickly run me into trouble i did get a bit of experience with trying out the quilting foot on my machine i had never used a proper quilting foot before so this was an opportunity for me to try to learn a little bit about it it made a massive difference to how the fabrics fed through which is no real surprise i took the remaining square pieces and cut them into two inch strips i then connected these strips at 45 degree angles and made long outer border pieces out of them i maybe could have just top stitched these border pieces into place but i was afraid of it looking messy and thrown together so i wound up hand stitching all the way around which took about 10 days to complete whatever i think the tiny irregular and obviously hand done stitches give it a little bit of personalized [Music] flair [Music] thank you very much for watching instead of the usual sign off i am going to introduce you to the wonderful person in whose memory these quilts have been [Music] made [Music] is [Music] is [Music] [Music] m [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] moscow [Music] is [Music] oh day

Channel: Resourceful Woman

Views: 1,888

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: memory quilt, sewing, quilting, bereavement, upcycle, shirts

Id: GxkiS-pdnXU

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021