Big progress on Justin's quilt

Yesterday at lunch I spent some time sewing together parts for this quilt and finished up the sewing and pressing of the parts last evening. I finally had enough parts to start designing. Here is the first layout

Next I added in scraps of fabrics Justin had used in clothes he had made

I added a few more bits and here is what it looked like when I went to bed. This morning I still like it!

I still need to add a bit of these two fabrics. I will add them where needed as I start to sew the top together.

I am going to have to do some hand stitching on this piece because of the non-cotton fabrics. I went looking for hand quilting thread and I only have off white. I donated all my colored hand quilting thread to a charity. Hum- what next? I looked at my pearl cotton and I have a few colors that would work, but I have No. 8 which is heavy and is hard to pull thru. Joanna gave a demo on big stitch quilting at our last Modern Quilt Guild meeting and she had I think some No. 12 and it was wonderful! I just don't want to spend a lot of money for pearl cotton on some of these weird colors and I don't even know where she bought hers. I will have to e-mail her. In the meantime here are a piece she showed us at the meeting with big stitching. Isn't it wonderful?

My next thought was to use embroidery floss. I have a case full of floss, but I could not find it this morning. I will have to dig deeper into the closet and see if I can find it.

So this weekend I will hopefully get this top sewn together, put together a backing with the back sections of the shirts (lots of fabric there!), and start stitching on this.

Have a great weekend!