Monday, January 25, 2010

Rag Quilts

My Mom has a major fabric stash. She has been cleaning out her three closet fulls of fabric and decided she has way too much flannel (among other things). So she threw a Help Me Get Rid Of My Stash party and invited a few friends over to make some rag quilts. Kind of like when your friends come over to help you shuck corn or shell butter beans. Don't you have friends like that?

There ended up being seven of us and at the beginning of the day, we had all seven machines going.



This was the "fun" table. My OLDER sister, Kim, is the one on the right with her long time BFF Kimberly - known as "Kim's friend".



We had five machines set up in the Dining Room. This is my Aunt Judy, which isn't really her name, but that's what we grew up calling her. You can see my trusty Pfaff 1471 (the older brown and cream) that I wouldn't trade for 10 brand new sewing machines.






My boys love my rag quilt that my Mom made for me several years ago; so Mom decided to make one for each boy's bed. It takes 80 squares (each square consist of 3 flannel squares sandwiched together and sewn together with an "X") to make a quilt to fit a twin size bed.



Once we had a huge stack made, Judy moved to the bed to arrange the squares while the rest of us kept sewing squares up. Then a couple of us moved to sewing up the quilts while Judy adjusted and arranged. It was quite an assembly.



My Mom working on piecing a quilt.



Kim and Kim's friend at one point were extremely pleased with themselves because they figured out how to work on the same quilt at the same time one two different machines.



The girls begged and begged for Judy to quit sewing and play with them. Of course, her being the cool aunt she is, she did. Judy was the fun aunt that I would go and spend the night with when I was younger. She would take me to movies and give me all her old makeup. I'm not so sure why the girls chose Monopoly; but she obliged and let them think they knew what they were doing.



At the end of the day; nine hours later and two ladies down we had five rag quilts done! Four quilts went home with me and one went home with Kim for a lap quilt to cuddle up with watching TV.



I do have a lot of work ahead of me. I still have to cut all those pesky seams and then wash them to have them ravel up. The boys couldn't wait, though, they are sleeping with their new quilts tonight!



Many thanks to my husband for coming home early and getting the boys off the bus so I could stay and play. I love you, babe.

5 comments:

Vicki said...

My wrists hurt from the day's work!
MOM

Knitika said...

That quilting party looks awesome! I hope some day to have huge sewing parties to plunder my incredible fabric stash. Too bad I don't have more flannel.

NancyJoJo said...

That really does look like a ton of fun Amy. I hope you post a picture of one of the quilts after they ravel up. Your mom is so cool.

kt said...

this looks both fun and productive :)

And I am coming to the States late Feb- mid march. Going to a bloggy meetup and seeing some of my fam. Visiting LA, Seattle, Spokane and Chicago. I'm both excited and very nervous (my first time out of the country and I am going alone -eek!)

ps. Love that your mum commented your blog - how cute!

Knitika said...

Thanks for your comment on my blog. I've got to say, I'm all totally inspired by seeing this post. I can't believe I'd never seen these quilts before, they're all over the internet now that I'm looking for them. I sometimes have my daughter's friends over for informal sewing sessions, and I'm totally thinking I'm going to have them make one of these.