Quilt Gifts – Quilt Therapy

Tarleton State University Embroidered Quilt

Posted on May 17, 2018 by TK HarrisonMay 12, 2018

When your daughter asks you to make a quilt, there is no better compliment. When she asks you to make her a quilt for a charity that she’s involved with, it takes it to a higher level!

For her freshman year of college at Tarleton State University (TSU) in 2017, she was the Hall Council Chair for the Honors College with the Residence Hall Association (RHA). She asked me to make a quilt that they could raffle off to the students, to bring more recognition to RHA. As we talked more and more about it, and as she talked with the RHA board of directors, they decided they’d like to have a quilt that included the logos of a number of groups around campus as well as the core values of the university.

They sent me the logos and I hired a digitizer to create the files that would work with my embroidery machine. Some of them worked the first time she digitized them. Unfortunately, for many of them, we had to go back and forth – her digitizing, me test-stitching, just to get them correct. But in the end, I met my deadline and the quilt was delivered with plenty of time for the RHA to raffle it off!

And just to add another kudo to my dear friend Meloney, her longarm quilting was icing on the Tarleton State University RHA raffle quilt cake!

Tarleton Quilt

RHA raffle quilt with the core values and 12 logos of TSU

Tarleton Quilt

Closeup of a TSU logo on the RHA raffle quilt

Tarleton Quilt

RHA quilt on the bed of the young lady who won it in the raffle

I’d also like to take just a wee bit of credit as my daughter received the Hall Council Chair award with the RHA at the end of her freshman year, and she was voted in as the vice president of the RHA for her sophomore year at TSU!

Braxton’s Baby Quilt

Posted on May 10, 2018 by TK HarrisonMay 9, 2018

When you get the opportunity to make a baby quilt for a long-time friend’s soon-to-be grandson, the pleasure begins with choosing the design. But it doesn’t end with delivering the quilt. No, it doesn’t end for a very long time – more like when that soon-to-be baby has a child of their own and you ask them if they still have the baby quilt you made for them when THEY were a baby! I’ve had the pleasure of finding that out within the last year and the thrill of knowing someone has saved their baby quilt (or their parents did) that you made them 18 or more years ago is over-the-top quilted love!

Braxton needed a baby quilt. The fabric color choices were not something I would choose as there were light’s and dark’s but no medium shades of fabrics. But the quilt grew on me as I sewed it together. And when I added the machine embroidery, that helped, too. The final thing that clinched my love for this quilt was when my dear friend Meloney quilted it (and added the binding!) for his quilt.

I rarely ask Meloney to quilt a quilt with any specific pattern. In fact, I can only think of two instances, in the 10+ years I’ve known her, where I’ve done so. She prefers to let the quilt talk to her and tell her what pattern to quilt it in. For Braxton’s quilt, once she saw the deer stag head shot, she felt quilting it with leaves was appropriate as it would signify a deer walking through a forest. And she was absolutely right!

Braxton's Baby Quilt

A Quilted God Moment

Posted on April 26, 2018 by TK HarrisonApril 21, 2018

When our oldest daughter graduated from high school, I gifted her with a quilt I’d pieced especially for her. It just so happened that the summer before her senior year of high school, I went to Iowa to visit my (third) foster mother. She purchased all of the fabric for our daughter’s quilt and I cut it out & sewed it together while I was there. Then I left it with her so she could quilt it by hand.

Now here’s a little tidbit you probably didn’t know about our middle daughter – she’s our “what about me?” kid. Every time we would give her older sister something, no matter what it was, she always looked at us with sad puppy dog eyes and said, “What about me?”

About four years ago, she went with me to a quilt shop. While there, she fell in love with two different fabrics. The first was an antique-looking fabric with all sorts of postcards on it. Not the front of the postcards, but the back of them – the messages, addresses, stamps & postage meter stamps. The second fabric did not match the first as it was not antique-looking but it matched the general theme with stamps and postage meter stamps. Where the postcard fabric had a beige background, the stamp fabric had a white background. I purchased a yard of each and stuck them in a stash bin, knowing I would make a quilt for her out of them someday.

I started her quilt the summer before her senior year, too. Except it was one thing after another that year, so it became a UFO in short order. I’d pull it out and work on it, as time would permit, but I couldn’t pull it off in time for her graduation.

It took over a year but about three weeks before she was set to return to college for her sophomore year, she finally asked, “What about my quilt?” I brushed it off, ignored the question, changed the subject, etc. She didn’t ask me again. Then, the day before we were set to take her back to college, I surprised her with her graduation quilt – made out of the fabrics that she’d chosen all those years ago & using the Sawtooth Star quilt block pattern.

Sawtooth Star Quilt

The God moment happened after we started unloading her boxes in her dorm room. Since she had no clue that I was making her a quilt, and no clue what the colors in the quilt were, she had previously purchased sheets for her dorm bed that were the exact same colors as her quilt!

Written with love by TK Harrison