Wednesday and I've got nothing new to show...

...I have been knitting on the Crossover Top, but it's not worth posting another picture that looks essentially the same as the one I posted on Friday. I have finished the back and am nearly done with the left front. Still to do are the right front and the sleeves. At first, I wasn't sure exactly how the left front was going to work. I just kept plugging away at it, making sure that I followed the instructions carefully. Now that I'm almost to the shoulder, it's looking just right.

Instead I'll show you one of my older finished projects. Click a picture to see the larger version. (Apologies up front about the picture quality: they are scans of photos. Eventually I'll retake them with a digital camera.)

The following pictures are of the quilt I made for our daughter's graduation from Stanford in 2000. This was my second full size quilt and was a year in the making. It is an attic windows quilt, which I find is one of the better patterns to show off novelty fabrics. I named the quilt "Livin' La Vida Violeta" because our daughter is always on the go, her favorite color is purple, and her degrees are in Spanish and Latin American Studies.

There are 80 6-inch squares on the front, each one representing a person, activity, or interest from her life. It starts in the top left corner with a 1978 block and ends in the bottom right corner with a Class of 2000 block. There are specialty buttons spread throughout, like a bicycle button on the Husband's block.

The back of the quilt is a cityscape fabric, with appliquéd city scenes, more patches, and other items. In the lavender border I hand wrote the names of all her family members, all of her friends, her favorite movies, and her favorite songs.

Collecting the fabrics was the most difficult part of the quilt. And then I had to limit myself to 80 squares because I didn't want this quilt to be huge. Whenever I couldn't find a fabric with the right motif, I went searching for anything that was made of fabric. For example, she loves Tigger. At the time there were no Tigger fabrics anywhere, but I found a pair of toddler overalls with a Tigger appliqué that I cut off and used in a block. I used old t-shirts, patches from her old cheerleading and basketball uniforms, and miniature flag replicas for the California, Costa Rica, and Mexico blocks.

Here's a sample of the blocks. This is the basketball block...

The sorority block (I cross stitched it--there weren't any fabrics or t-shirts with this on it)...

And one of my favorites, the pea pod block. Pea Pod was her nickname as a baby and she had a stuffed pea pod toy that she carried around. I made this 3 dimensional appliqué to commemorate that. The face on the top pea matches the pea pod toy's face.

The other major part of this project was the book I made to go with it. The book explains how I made the quilt and has a description and picture for each of the squares.

This was probably the largest project I've done, but it was well worth seeing the look on her face when she opened it!

Back on Friday with some eye candy!