The Grandson Project

 

This was a fun one! My Grandson is learning his alphabet and one of my students, Traci, practiced her free motion quilting by making quilted letters for her Grandson. I totally, 100% got the idea from Traci; thank you!

I started out by just using batting between two layers of fabric, but I thought that might be a little floppy. I grabbed some Fast2Fuse from my stash for the middle layer instead. Fast2Fuse was designed for mailable postcards and is a 2-sided stiff fusible, perfect for the letters!

This is a documentary, not a tutorial! There are probably better ways to do this, but I wanted it done NOW so that he could use them. If I dithered around making it perfect, he’d be in college.

I took my normal email font, Aptos, took it bold and to 500 in size, and printed on normal printing paper. I’ve used Golden Threads and I don’t see that it releases a whole lot easier than plain ole printer paper. I then layered those atop my sandwich:

I stitched around it three times to get a secure edge with 12 wt thread:

At first I free handed the letters, but then I realized that there are a lot of straight lines in the alphabet. I got out my Line Tamer to quilt those lines.

The Line Tamer is the bomb, the ONLY ruler I use for straight lines because your ruler foot fits snugly into the channel and you WILL have a perfectly straight line.

After stitching each line 3 times, I released the paper:

You can see that the center letter part still has the paper on.

See those little bits of paper? They can be tricky to get out. I used my friend Heidi Proffetty’s handy dandy tweezers to get those pesky things out pretty easily. Seriously, it was way harder with my regular tweezers.

Mr. L is a car and truck kinda guy, so I used some fun theme fabric for the backing:

Yes, my tension was not perfect. Again, the goal was to do my best, but get the letters to him. I don’t think less-than-perfect tension will traumatize him😊

Using 12 wt thread can be challenging; it is just so fat. You cannot put 12 wt in the bobbin, but you do need something beefier than your normal 50 wt bobbin thread. I typically use King Tut, a 40 wt/3 ply. With a little more time and patience, I could have gotten the tension better.

The right needle with that thick thread is important. I thought a 90 might work, but I got thread breaks:

I upped it to a 100 and all ran smoothly.

I do this so often that you’d think I’d learn:

Ugh, that was not fun to unpick!

Those edges needed to be pinked so that the fabric would not ravel with use. Using a pinking scissors would not have worked; the Fast2Fuse is waaaay too sturdy to do that. I used my pinking rotary blade and even that was a challenge. My hands are very sore! But it worked well.

I was going to make a cute little custom fabric box to hold them all…..but remember, I’m trying to get this out. I searched the house and came up with the perfect container:

So cute! I was going to decorate the container….but again, I wanted to get this out.

So this was my week, a fun little project! Thank you Traci for the clever idea!

I’ll be linking up:
Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday