My three children and I each had fun making our quilt blocks for The Great American Birthday Quilt.
What we needed
We started by gathering fabric scraps from a neighbor's yard sale. We found lots of red, white, and blue prints, but also mixed in other bright and fun colors. At first, we tried to use tacky glue, but it didn't work well. So we made a quick trip to the craft store and picked up Ailene’s Fabric Fusion glue—much better!
Planning out our designs
What do you celebrate most about America?
Each of us chose a theme that felt meaningful to us as our inspiration. I focused on freedom in my design. I decided to represent our freedom to vote, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.
Emma was inspired by family and ancestry. She had saved a quilt block from a family quilt that was meaningful to her and added a tree on top to symbolize our family tree.
Olivia wanted to celebrate America's diversity as represented by different flavors of pie - cherry, blueberry, key lime, and lemon.
My son kept things easy and decided an apple felt very American to him. It's also one of his favorite snacks.
It was fun to see how differently we each interpreted the prompt!
Creating our blocks
After coming up with and sketching out our basic concepts, we searched online for silhouette images that matched our theme - a tree, an apple, an eagle, and a pie. We sized them to the proper dimensions for our quilt blocks and traced them onto a piece of paper.
Start with one piece of 12"x12" fabric or one of the other acceptable quilt block sizes (12” x 14”, 16” x 16”, or 16” x 20”). You may see this fabric or cover it up with your cut-out designs of fabric. With plastic or paper protecting your table, glue the pieces to your quilt background. It took us 1-3 hours, depending on the complexity of the design.
We're excited to see our quilt block contributions as part of The Great American Birthday Quilt!
