Toni-Dee's Birthday QuillowToni-Dee's Birthday QuillowMachine pieced and quilted. Measures roughly 55" x 88". Toni Dee's mother, Nora, had collected several T-shirts and nightshirts featuring Toni Dee's favorite trademark cartoon characters, and asked me if I could combine them all into a casual quilt. We "played" with the various shirts for several hours on my living room floor until we finally came up with the quillow idea.
The center panel was one shirt. Another shirt was cut up for the individual framed pictures (creating a challenge in itself--see below.) A third shirt was converted into the quillow pocket.
The heavy plastic printing on the shirts was difficult to sew through, but I kept at it with a ball-point needle and lots of perseverance. After the pictures were framed with navy fabric, the rest of the contruction was a piece of cake.
Some characters overlapped each other's frames on the original shirt, as you can see here with the "tiger's" ear and the baby joey's square. What to do, what to do?
A clever label, to the rescue!
My youngest son, Miles, observed that the hole looked like a cloud, thus providing the key to the solution. Once again, I used my computer to come up with a font I liked (and seemed to fit the character of the quillow), traced it to fabric, and sewed it over the hole.
The finished quillow, all folded up into its pillow-pouch. Quilting was simple--I just outlined the character and words on the shirt (as you can see if you look carefully at the checkerboard side of the pillow.) The "dots" you see on the blue squares are really honey bees.