Boy Side or Girl Side?

I just finished my first quilt.

Insert happy dance here.

This was a project three years in the making. I first thought about doing it when I gave birth to Little Brother six years ago and started pulling out all the clothes that Big Brother had worn four years previously. I thought it would be neat to someday make a quilt out of my favorite outfits that they'd both worn.

And then, for the last three years I held out hope that I would have another child. Well, about eight months ago, I finally got to the point where I wasn't hoping for that anymore (hoping instead, dear God, puh-lease don't let me get pregnant again), and decided it was time to start cutting up the clothes. After I bought some new "tools," of course.


Now, I'm not going to give you any sort of tutorial, because I am NOT a seamstress. I made this quilt just like I make a lot of things: Decide what I want to do, jump in with both feet, eyeball things along the way, and hope they turn out. Instead, I'll just share the general gist of what I did.

Here are my squares.

I laid them all out...

Quite a few times...

Until I ran across this pattern, and decided I wanted to do something similar.

Here's my finished product (the boy side)

Then, on the other side (the girl side) I just pieced together a few really large pieces of material, most of which I already had on hand. I decided to do it completely different from the boy side, so that it would be more versatile.

Here's a close-up of some of the cut up shirts:

And the boys in some of those clothes (way back when).

Big Brother:

Little Brother:

Little Brother:

Big Brother:

So I kicked my old comforter - that used to be on the end of my bed - to the curb and replaced it with the new one. It's not perfect (FAR from it), but I made it, and it's got some great sentimental value to it. Can't beat that with a stick.