Laura's Quilt is FINALLY DONE!

My daughter, Laura is my little side-kick that you can see with me in the "About Me" photo to the right. Laura is 26 years old, deaf and mentally "challenged." She functions on the level of a five-year old and we communicate with her using sign language. Whatever I do, Laura wants to do too! So she carries around her little stitchery projects to work on and she also sews on her little Elna sewing machine whenever I let her.

One of my goals for this quarter was to help Laura finish her little quilt. What I didn't expect was that the "little" quilt would end up becoming a twin bed-size quilt and that Laura would become a Quilt Monster! She wants to sew ALL the time! (Hmmm...wonder where she gets THAT from??!!) The only problem is, she can't really sew without some guidance. And trying to explain things in sign language gets a little frustrating at times! But...we've done it anyway!

Here's an example of some of Laura's sewing. A bit wonky, but she's getting better everyday. She initially sewed together many, MANY 2.5-inch strips into pairs that I then matched with other pairs and cut and pinned for Laura to sew into 4-patches. I also cut some black fabric that I had into 4.5-inch squares. Laura sewed her 4-patches, then sewed each 4-patch to a black square.

Eventually she sewed them all together into 14 rows of 17 squares! The rows were a bit wonky too and I had to trim them a bit before giving them to her (I pinned them at each seam) to sew together.

Laura's actually been getting the whole process down fairly well. I cut the pieces and pin them together, then she sews and presses them. And we do this over and OVER again! She was so excited to finally get the main body of her quilt finished Friday night!

Saturday morning she was up bright and early to sew the borders on her quilt. The entire top was put together by her, except that I sewed the border strips together. But she added them all to the quilt, after I pinned them. There were some places where the sewing was so bad, I had to have her rip out part of the seams and she was NOT happy about that (sounds like the rest of us!). Fortunately, she's gotten so much better that that didn't happen too often. And I'm always close by to try and guide her and keep her from making too many mistakes that she'll have to undo. Sometimes I even do the ripping for her!

She had the entire top finished by noon on Saturday and immediately began signing that she wanted me to quilt it! So the two of us made a quick trip to our LQS for some backing fabric. Fortunately, after we got home, some of her siblings and their children came over to have an Easter egg hunt, so I was able to get the quilt loaded onto the longarm frame and quilted without her hovering. Then I machine-stitched the binding to it. She came back into the studio, just as I was finishing. She was so tickled when she saw the label I had added. She can read a few words, but she easily recognized "Laura and Mom," on the label.

The two of us went outside to take some pictures of the finished quilt. Charles was in the shower, so we had to do it all by ourselves. I had her stand on the seat of the tractor and hung the quilt on the roll bar. The seat was a little unstable, so she wasn't comfortable holding the quilt out at arms' length (and the wind was blowing too).

Then I took a picture of the backing fabric--pizza bagels! It was a small LQS where we went to to buy it, but the closest to our house. They didn't have much that would go with the quilt (and we needed 6 yards), but Laura loves both bagels and pizza and it had a black background, so we decided it would work!

Of course, Laura's greatest goal was to get the quilt on her bed! So we put put it on there and took a picture of her posing with it. Unfortunately, it looks like now she's going to need a new pillow case and curtains to match her quilt!