Quilt Update and Boot Straps

Is it just me or did this weekend go by in the blink of an eye?  And the week!  Lately, I've felt like Jordan and I have a lot of pokers in the fire.  A part of me wonders if we have too much going on but then I also love that we keep ourselves busy.  They say that people who are "busy" truly accomplish more, right?  At least I hope that's true.

For today I'm going to give you guys a little update on our t-shirt quilt.  I know this seems like a project that has taken a long time to come to fruition, but I actually feel like the project is moving along really well; that is in large part due to my friend, Wendy, and her awesome talents.  She is so kind to help me with this project and I've learned so much from her!

We recently had a quilting workshop together and got cracking on this project again.  We are not "finished" but it is so close!  I can't wait to show you all the finished quilt!  During our last visit, things really started to come together and I'm so excited with how it looks!

We last left off with simple t-shirt squares that had been ironed to "backing".  The backing helped to stiffen up the shirts so we could cut them to size.  For our purposes, 1 "square" will be finished at 12 inches by 12 inches.  As such, we cut each square to 12.5 inches by 12.5 inches so we have a seem allowance on both sides.  
Left: This is a pile of our work from last time!  Wendy really knocked out a lot of these so I have to give her credit!
Top Right: Close-up of the action happening.
Bottom Right: This is our blue print on graph paper.  This turned out to be a really handy thing to have so that we could visualize our work, measure easily, and avoid errors.


We started by laying all the t-shirts out on the floor (right).  This gave us the opportunity to do one last re-arranging if needed and also helped us to keep things in order.  Wendy had already pre-cut the fabric for the sashing and corner squares so we got started on those strips (top and bottom left).

About mid-way through the day we had strips of t-shirts sewn together with sashing in-between and then we also had strips of sashing with corner stones sewn in-between.  In the top picture, you can see us start to pair these together. In the bottom picture, you can see a close up of the sashing strips.

Wendy mentioned that with every step, the steps would get easier and easier.  That was  true because the pieces really started to come together and I could picture what the final quilt would look like!

We sewed 1 strip of t-shirts to 1 strip of sashing.  In the above pictures, you can start to see the quilt line up nicely.  Around this point we both started to get pretty tired.  We were approaching a good stopping point, so we decided to pause our work and make a game plan for our next visit.  There are still some big steps ahead of us but it was great to see the project ":materialize".  (Haha, see what I did there?)

Later in the weekend Jordan got to try out his new cowboy boots!  He picked these out all on his own and I'm pleasantly surprised with how great they look!  Jordan has great taste and these looked awesome on him.  Thanks to our amigo, Nathan, for helping him find a deal!

Goofy Jordan and his boots.

We had a lovely dinner Saturday night with our friends, Nathan and Mallory.  Nathan recently got a fancy new grill so we all shared a little surf and turf (after the grill was assembled).  Dinner turned out amazing!  It was a quintessential summer meal!

Abby and Jordan had a good time hanging outside while him and Nathan cooked!  Love our little lady.  And of course, I had to include a picture of part of our meal!  Yum!

Hope you all have a great week!

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