Scrapbooker to Quitler

Even though I stick pretty much to scrapbooking, I am usually up for a challenge. My daughter, Kara and our friend April, who manage a local Subway store, asked - no, they begged - me to make a quilt for their boss using all of the old Subway promotional tee shirts that their boss did not want to get rid of. 

So I thought "how hard could it be to sew some shirts together"?  Mind you, I had never "quilted" before, nor had I ever attempted to make a quilt or a blanket. But with an idea in my head, I decided to cut a 12x12 piece of all the shirts and sew them onto 14x14 squares of white fleece. Every square of the shirts was "hemmed" along the edges first, then sewn onto the white fleece. Even though I pressed and measured every square, it was difficult as the tee shirts were stretchy and really hard to manage. I filled the quilt with batting and made the back side all white fleece.

They middle square was made of a tee shirt that had little printing on it, so all the employees used a permanent fabric marker to sign all their names. The bottom right square was left for me to write a message for the boss. All I had to do was write "Thank you -  Merry Christmas - love from your Freya crew". That's it, just those 9 little words written with a permanent fabric marker, and I would be done with that big hunk of fleece and those stinkin' tee shirts! Yep, 60 hours and 12,000 yards of thread and it would be done! Whew! I gave it to the crew, nicely folded and packaged so they could officially present it to their boss. Done deal. Everyone was impressed and excited to present the gift to their beloved boss.

And then the bomb went off! Kara called me and said "You majored in English in college, so here's a question for you. How do you spell Christmas?" As soon as she said those words, I knew the worst had happened. You guessed it! In permanent ink, I spelled Christmas without the R in it. Devastation led to panic, which led to trying to come up with an idea to cover it or fix it. I had used all the tee shirts, so I couldn't make a new square, so I figured I would fix it. No problem, I thought, I did it all the time with scrapbooking - make a mistake, cover it up! Piece of cake!

Well, it wasn't easy, but I wrote Christmas (spelled correctly, I may add) on a corresponding color, hemmed it and sewed it over the original. Then, I did the same thing with the word Freya (their store name) so that it could be construed that these words were simply "highlighted". It wasn't perfect, but it was the best I knew how to fix it.

Everyone thought it was the best gift ever - handmade and heartfelt - and the boss never knew the real story!

We all laugh about it now, because, well, it is sort of funny. Just don't be surprised if I send you a holiday greeting saying "Merry Chistmas"!