Bon Voy Oz Quilt

July 28, 2017

Bon Voy Oz Quilt

A quilt for my dear friend Joni, or Oz, as she is widely known. I have been her accompanist at school for the past 14 years and this year, she retired. To celebrate her, the high school kids and I came up with this idea for a word quilt. The kids generated the list of words and I put the quilt together. We had to keep so many secrets to pull off the surprise! But with lots of behind the scenes messages and me sewing every night for a few weeks, I was able to finish the quilt top before school was out in May and we surprised her with a little party and the quilt top!

At first, I wanted to do improv words but in the interest of time, I made fusible applique instead. I found these awesome free applique letter fonts on Shannon Brinkley's website and used her method to transfer the letters and fusible to the fabric. I also used several different styles of stencils to have a wide variety of fonts to work with.

I filled the inbetween spaces with quilt blocks that matched some of the words like a heart, compass star, friendship star, bear paw and lots of little improv bits. That was fun to do but it was also difficult to puzzle it all together! I stared at these pieces on my floor for a long time!

For the backing, I had a piece of fabric at her final choir concert that anyone could sign. I found some double sided fabric markers in fun colors for people to sign with and am happy to say that all the signatures made it through the wash! For the label, I traced a cute boat from a coloring book and used the same fabric markers to color it in.

I am so excited to have this quilt all done and ready to give to her! It is certainly a very special project for a very special person. I'm going to miss working with Joni so much!