Simply Vintage – A Vintage Sheet Quilt

I love quilts. I love vintage sheets. And I LOVE quilting! So when you put those things together, you end up with a colorful, vintage-y quilt! The real fun part about this quilt is that I put it together, start to finish, in a single day! It was a little crazy and certainly ambitious, but I got it done!!

The only thing that I had done before I started this epic quilting project was cut the squares. Great big awesome 12.5 inch vintage sheet squares. I had originally planned on using them to make a queen size quilt for my own bed, eventually that will happen, but instead I used them for this extra-large lap quilt for a friend!

This whole crazy thing all started when my bloggy friend Brittany posted on instagram about a project she was working on when she should have been packing to move! They’re leaving the Fort Worth area and moving to Louisiana… I laughingly suggested that I’d take all her fabric off her hands so that she didn’t have to pack it… and then she laughingly suggested that she’d swap me fabric for a vintage sheet quilt. Before we knew it, we were serious about the whole thing! Well Brittany moves in less than a week and had a massive bag of fabric for me (think over flowing garbage bag full of fabric goodness), so we made arrangements for me to come pick it up… shipping was really not an option! I don’t often get to visit the Metroplex area… hubby hates the traffic and I am pretty much terrified of driving in it, plus Hubs is on the road… so my friend Shelli came to the rescue!

On Monday we made the arrangements for Wednesday (yesterday). Monday night I had the thought that I should really “whip up” the promised quilt since I really didn’t want to have to ship it ( Hello shipping Fees! ) and I REALLY wanted to see Brittany’s reaction! So the plan for Tuesday changed from blogging and shop stuff to a netflix marathon and quilting until I couldn’t quilt any longer!

My day of quilting wasn’t without its hiccups… I got the top pieced together in record time. That’s the nice thing about using nice big squares of solid fabric. I quickly moved onto quilting. I grabbed a sheet out of my stash to use as backing, layered it, the batting and the top all together. Once pinned it was go time! Quilting a 68″ by 56″ quilt on my vintage beast of a machine was not an easy thing. A third of the way in, I checked the back and discovered I had a 12 inch pucker and another 7 inch one that simply HAD to be fixed! Ugh! It took almost 2 hours to fix those nasty little buggers! Needless to say I was hyper vigilant about checking for puckers as I went after that!

Once quilted and trimmed, it was time to bind! Suddenly I was freaking out!! What on earth was I going to use for the binding? After sorting through the vintage fabric that hasn’t quite made it to the new fabric shelves, I discovered the perfect thing to use for binding! I scored 6 yards of this vintage flower print for $1.50 at the thrift store, added it to the vintage fabric bin and promptly forgot about it. Ha!

I seriously thought about hand-stitching the binding… but since it was 11pm and it was going to a house with 5 kids, I figured machine stitching was a better option!

 

I have to say the whole thing turned out better than I thought it did a first! After a good nights sleep, a wash and double checking for threads, it was time to head to Fort Worth! I’ll admit, I had second thoughts about handing this quilt over… Its. Just. So. Pretty!

 

 

Brittany loved it! Her youngest daughter loved it! And I was so glad that I was crazy enough to challenge myself to a marathon of quilting! That being said… I won’t be doing that again any time soon! 😉