Malcolm's 13th Birthday Baseball Quilt

For this quilt, I used the wonderfully simple "Turning Twenty...Again" book.  Basically you cut up fat quarters into various-sized squares, an assortment of various sizes of rectangles, and then put the blocks together with an medley of different fabrics.  I had been collecting baseball themed fabric for years, and I supplemented them with some green fabrics from my stash and from the quilt fabric store.  Green is Malcolm's favorite color!  I had some of the focus fabric that is used for the borders and within the blocks on hand, but I located more of it online on Etsy; I was delighted, as then I had enough for the borders.

After the quilt was pieced, quilted,  and bound, I started transferring images of Malcolm that Susan had sent to me onto fabric, using special products that you can run through an ink jet printer.  Once I had all that I wanted, I adhered Wonder Under fusible to them and ironed them on.  I had to reinforce this bond, however, by stitching around each image.  The very hardest job in making this quilt was this stitching!  It was really challenging to wrestle this rather large quilt under my machine, but at least now I know the photos are permanently attached to the quilt.

Why not adhere the photos before quilting?  Well, I didn't want the quilter I hired to quilt OVER any images, fearing they would be obscured.

This quilt will become a wall hanging.  The last step will be to make and attach the sleeve to the back so that it can be hung on some sort of rod.

Below are some of my favorite of the images!

Malcolm with a trophy!  His "travel select" team (The Maroons) won
many of the tournaments they were in this summer.

Here is the team.  Malcolm is the 4th from the left in the front row!

Another photo I love, showing Malcolm in the maroon uniform.

This block in the center of the quilt contains photos of Malcolm with various members
of his family.  Unlike the other images, they are placed around the block and not in the big
square.  That big square in this block contains the "focus fabric," and
I wanted to leave it as it was, without covering it with any of the photographs!