My husbands grandma was widowed in her early 20's leaving her to raise two children alone. One day following the death of her husband, she took her kids and headed to Hawaii to visit a friend. While the friends were on a trip to Utah and she was watching their children for them, she met a Hawaiian man who she eventually married and 50 years later, they are still enjoying life together. After several years in Hawaii, he was able to transfer his job from the Chevron refinery in Hawaii to the coast of California and they settled down in El Segundo, California. They stayed there for like 40 years. However, age and cost of living caused them to need to move. We were and are still so excited that they finally moved to Utah. They live exactly 22 minutes from our house and my kids have really enjoyed getting to know their great-grandparents better.
Nana started making Hawaiian shirts for the men in the family many many years ago. My husband owns his fair share of "nana-made" shirts.
About 6 years ago, she started taking the scraps and started making scrappy shirts to sell at a festival in El Segundo. They really became super popular. I really love my husbands with the bright sleeves and pocket with the more subdued inner colors and color.
She is like me and kept all the scraps from her projects. In 2010, my mother in law and I were in a storage shed behind their house going through various dress-ups she had kept and wanted to send home with us. She pulled out this box of Hawaiian fabric and set it aside. I asked her what it was. It was fabric she had asked her mom for to make a quilt. However, my mother in law works full time and with her other responsibilities, she didn't have time to finish the quilt. So, I took the box home and spent 2 months cutting up all the scraps. I wish so bad that I could find the pictures of that project. It was insane. The amount of scraps made enough 2 inch strips to make a queen size Jelly Roll strip quilt and a California King sized rag quilt. When we head to Vegas next month to visit, I will finally do a post of these quilts. I have meant to for years, but each time I take pictures of the quilts they get lost.
After I finished, I asked if I could keep the small scraps. Since then I have made several lap quilts for people from the fabric. This one I made for my husbands youngest aunt, the youngest daughter of his Nana and Tutu.
The last one I made and finished this last summer for us of a few small squares I still had.
When Nana was making her move to Utah she had a 6 month period where her home in california was sold and the home they purchased in Utah was still occupied. She wanted new bedding with a fresh look for her home. She had complained that I used the fabric to make everyone else a quilt, but I hadn't made her one. So, I brought a stack of patterns by the house she was staying at and we spent an hour sorting through them. She picked the pattern from Moda's Frivol No. 8 "
Bread and Butter". I immediately sort of regretted having given her that option. I mean, seriously, I squared off 1, 1138 HST for this quilt!!! This picture is only a fraction of the hours I spent just cutting my box of scraps into strips and then cutting them to the square size, sewing them together with a white square and squaring them off. I thought I would never finish.
The next 3 months ensued. I did spend hours working on the quilt, but of course it was regular crazy life and the holidays, so it never goes quite as planned. The next sequence of pictures shows the progress from the blocks, to laying them out, sashing the blocks, taking the layers to our church building with a sweet 15 year old from around the corner who came and helped me lay out the layers of the quilt, baste spray them and pin them together. I can't tell you how hard rolling that thing up was in my sewing machine arm. I broke so many needles. I stayed up like 72 hours straight machine quilting that thing. I listened to something like nine 13-20 hour audiobooks at double time. Not to mention the 4500 yards of white thread I went through. (PS. Sigh, I LOVE connecting threads thread in my machine.) I had hours of crying as I would get right to the middle of the rolling the quilt and then the thread would break in the machine. I had many bobbins ready to just pop in, but many times that I had to take the entire quilt out of the machine. The number of times I had my husband arranging our kitchen chairs to get the weight of the quilt up on the table and not pulling away from the machine were many!!! Honestly, I am not sure, with the exception of a quilt for my own bed, if I will ever want to machine quilt a king sized quilt ever again in my machine. However, I have learned it is possible.
There was one point where I had been up at Nana's every spare moment I had helping her lift and move boxes, unpacking, grading finals for the class I was teaching that semester at BYU, keeping the kids out of rooms with fresh paint in her house that I thought maybe I shouldn't be trying so hard to get this christmas gift done. But, what better thing to wake up to on Christmas morning than the unexpected.
If you look really close in the picture above and the one below you can see my one mistake!! The one block that is turned JUST WRONG!!! I saw it after I had already started machine quilting the quilt and there was no way I was taking it apart at that point.
I literally dropped it off late on Christmas Eve for her to open on Christmas morning. I just wanted to sleep a long winters sleep that night. I went by the day after Christmas to see it on Nana's bed. Throughout the process I had taken several blocks up and laid them out on her bed to make sure they went the exact length and width she wanted, but she had never seen it with the yellow/brown sashing I chose to put on the quilt. OH it turned out sooooo beautiful in the end!!! All those little scraps!!
Nana's birthday is in the end of Jan, so I went and found some fun fabric to make normal pillow covers and took two of the left over blocks to make tiny decorative pillows. One of her friends from Hawaii had send her the two blue pillows many years ago that she finally had a place to put them. My mother in law made her a decorative flower arrangement to go above the bed. The entire finish just turned out amazing. I still can't believe that I made that quilt from all those little tiny tiny scraps. I probably had 4 boxes on scraps and honestly only used less than one. Scraps really go a long way with a good background fabric.
So, in the end I thought I needed one more row than I end up needing. So, I had 9 spare blocks that I had stuck in my fabric stash. I pulled them out last summer and whipped up a tiny mini-quilt to put on the back of my couch during the summer months.
I just LOVE the border/sashing fabric I found at my local quilt shop. And the random 2 yard/4 inch wide strip of red fabric that I used as the middle square was just the right amount of contrasting color without being too obnoxiously different from rest of the quilt. It was simply the perfect small print design with a little flair. Did you spy the small turtle pillow cover I made? When I finally get to posting the gifts I made for christmas in 2017, you will see A LOT of baby turtle pillow covers and table runners. The fabric she used to make all those Hawaiian shirts for so many years is like the gifts that keeps on giving. I have now sewn 1 California King, 1 King, 1 Queen, and 3 Lap quilts from those scraps...not including the 5 pillow covers and 3 table runners I made this Christmas. I still have 2 boxes that are overflowing and she has more scraps from recent shirts she also made. I will forever be grateful I was able to make this bedding and give it to her within 2 weeks of her moving into her new home. I will always treasure this memory. Hope you enjoyed.
