Girl Scout Quilt Number 1, which is really number 2

Okay, NOW I can show you what we've been keeping secret for MONTHS! This year our Girl Scout troop made 2 quilts. The first one we made for a very special young lady. I will share about that one tomorrow. The second one we made was for our troop leader. I don't know if she suspected anything, but she certainly couldn't have known exactly what we were doing. We had each girl design a quilt square using fabric markers or embroidery. Each design represented what they thought about Girl Scouts. Those were used on Quilt 1 for a fellow scout. She had NO idea & I can't wait to tell you more about that.

The other quilt, for our Troop Leader, Kelly, used each girls handprints and signature. Getting their signatures on the hands was quite interesting. Since I am a dork & didn't think about letting the handprints dry then having the girls sign them, I jumped through hoops to get names on there. I had them write their name, I scanned them, resized them, printed them in reverse, went over those with iron on transfer markers, ironed them on, and on some, had to go over them with fabric markers. Really, wouldn't it have made much more sense to let them write it? Well, the truth is we PLANNED to embroider all the names. Best laid plans....

I had extra Girl Scout Fabric from the first quilt, so we used that for Kelly's quilt. I found pictures that featured the whole troop and some with her in them. I printed those onto fabric, then sewed them to white squares. The fabric included some letters and numbers, so we were able to put our troop number on it. My friend Kathy and her daughter Annie arranged the pieces and Annie sewed them together for the front. I sewed the pieces for the back together. Then Natalie (my daughter) and I discovered that using quilt basting spray and getting all the wrinkles out is harder than it looks! Thankfully there were the 2 of us. She's actually pickier than I am and was NOT settling for ANY bubbles or wrinkles at all. I just had to get her to listen to the best way to get them out. LOL!

The real fun started when we quilted it. Did you know that quilts with cotton batting are heavy? Quite heavy? Of course, all the paint & pictures probably didn't help the weight issue. I quilted the vertical seams in the ditch using my walking foot. Then Natalie quilted the horizontal seams. I went back and did diagonal stitching on the Girl Scout fabric squares. Then, because I really just am a glutton for punishment wanted to be sure the batting wouldn't shift, I free-motion quilted around the handprints and the pictures. Kathy suggested using the backing to wrap around as a border & binding which worked really well. Except I couldn't figure out exactly how to get the corners mitered correctly. I should have called Kathy, but by then it was about midnight or 1 a.m.

Now, if you read my last post you know that I was still up at 3 a.m. And at 4 a.m. I had my dvr set for the wedding. If you didn't read that part shame on you go read it now so you'll know what I'm talking about. I think you're seeing now WHY I was still up at 3 a.m. You see, after I got the binding on, I thought it needed to be washed before we gave it to her. So I put it on gentle. Which meant it. didn't. wring. out. (I just typed it that way to sound like all the popular bloggers---ha! ha!) It took several "spins" to get it to not be soaking. Finally, I left it to dry overnight. Then I stayed up because I was SURE the ceremony would start any time. Or not.

Now you know the rest of the story. Tomorrow I'll share the story of Quilt 2, which is really Quilt 1.

By the way, Kelly is very petite, so her quilt is shorter than the one for the Girl Scout, who is normal sized. LOL! Kelly tells me I'm freakishly tall b/c I say she's so short!