18 years of "Play Ball!"

This quilt has been so fun to make.  Pieced, quilted, bound, boxed, and in the mail for graduation on Saturday~!  Justin has been an athlete all his life.  He is graduating from Eastern Oregon University after enjoying 4 years playing football for the EOU Mountaineers.

His Mom has saved T-shirts from his pre-school T-Ball Baseball games through high school.  He added a few "Mountaineers" shirts.  I didn't plan it, but here is the beginning and the end side by side in this photo.

Pantograph: Hurricane by Kristin Hoftyzer

This block was a sweatshirt with a couple of sweatshirt appliqués from other parts of the shirt.  Who knew "sweatshirt" and "appliqué" could play nice?  Quilted up just great.

My favorite part.  I pieced his name on the back.

This is a great book if you want to piece letters.

Some of the older shirts had wonky numbers.  You can follow the generations of iron on/screen printing techniques and see the improvements over the past years.

The older shirts had those thick plastic numbers like this shiny black number.  While they don't give you any problems, you have to make sure you don't run out of thread on one of these numbers.  Any needle holes made in this plastic stuff are there for ever and ever.

See that patch I took from the sleeve and sewed on here?  Here's how I sew over it...

If you have something that your hopping foot might hit up against here is what I do: (If I am doing a freehand design from the front of the machine, this step is irrelevant.)  When I get to the area where the "bump" will be, I mark a spot with some painter's tape on the table over the pattern so I have a visual cue where to slow down.

Then, on the quilt top, I put painters tape over the "bump."  You can also use the sticky plastic wrap: Press and Seal by Glad. I have a roll of it in my studio that I used every once in a while for different things.  But, for a small area, I think tape works better.

This allows your hopping foot to glide right up on the patch and you simply slow down and continue sewing when you get to this area.

The needle perforates the tape and you simply pull it off when you are done.  Easy peasy.

Here is a link to the beginning of this quilt:  T-Shirt: work in progress .  I forgot to take photos of cutting and stabilizing the shirts.  However, I have a couple more t-shirt quilt to do and will share that process later.