jersey – Quest Quilts

*A quick note to say that the picture at the top is one of the in-progress pictures. I forgot to get a final picture. That happens a lot.

This quilt was a first for me in regards to theme. It’s a hockey quilt. If you know anything about the state of Georgia, you’ll understand why I don’t have more of these. Georgia’s climate specializes in heat and humidity, and what’s “cold” to us is a fair day up in Vermont. So yeah, it’s amazing I’ve even gotten one hockey quilt.

That being said, hockey jersey material really is like no other, and I loved working with it. You know when you get your hands on some high quality copy paper? The good stuff? You know how you can tell by its texture and thickness that it was made to last? These hockey jerseys felt the same way – only in fabric form.

I’ve worked with football, baseball, and softball jerseys aplenty, but the hockey jersey presented one big problem those others didn’t. A big problem. Big. The jersey fonts and numbers were huge because they needed to go over all that padding. I ended up using my standard block size for all of the rows except the last one. If you look carefully, you’ll notice the bottom row is slightly longer. That was the only way I was going to be able to get everything fitted in. And even then I had to shorten and rearrange some of the trim and names. But in the end I think it worked out just fine.

There was one element on this quilt that was completely new for me. The client gave me a couple of pairs of hockey socks and said something along the lines of, “I don’t know if you can do anything with these, but here they are.” I told her I’d see what I could manage because I had an idea. I was able to sew them together with no issues, but I sure did bite my lip when my quilting machine went over them, afraid for all parties involved. But the machine took the knitted socks in stride, and I simply avoided the bulky seam part when possible. I love pointing to those two blocks and telling people that those were socks. I think it’s so funny.