The Books Quilt – Teacher Gifts

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I made teacher quilts this year. At this point I had two different teachers who each taught 3 of my children. That alone merited something special. We had one teacher in particular this year worthy of sainthood. Since I can’t officially bestow that status, I decided that a quilt was my next best option.

This teacher, Miss K, has been a blessing to our family as she has taught my three oldest children. My oldest is 17 now and she still goes back to visit this teacher 5 years later. Miss K has a huge classroom library – she loves to read and loves helping her students love to read, helping them find books that interest them. Over the past 5 years, we have borrowed more books than I can count, so when I saw this book-inspired-quilt made by Cristina, I knew I needed to make something similar for Miss K!

Miss K’s favorite color is orange so I decided to start with that color. I added some blue because those are the school colors and threw in a little brown to give the quilt some contrast and because I liked how it looked. 🙂

This is a really fun quilt to make.

A) It was fun to just pull from my stash. I grabbed most of my oranges and started cutting them up. The entire quilt (backing included) was all from my stash. Nice. I even had this awesome orange paper-clip yardage that I’d picked up last year. It turned out to be a perfect border for an orange teacher quilt!

B) It’s a  deceptively quick project because of strip-piecing. After sewing long strips together, you cut the individual “books” in different widths and then line them up and sew them together. Cristina’s tutorial on the Missouri Star Quilt Co blog is so helpful and got me started.  I modified it a little as I went, but definitely took all my inspiration from that post.

I had just a tiny bit of that castle fabric from sewing samples for Quilt Market with Sarah Jane’s new Magic collection coming out this summer. Since half the books we borrow are some kind of fantasy genre, the castles felt perfect for book spines.

A huge thanks to my friend Monica for doing the quilting for me so that I could finish it before the last day of school. I finished binding it that morning, threw the quilt on my fence for some pictures, and ran out the door.

I’m most proud that I remembered to add a label. I used the custom labels from Modern Yardage and it turned out perfect!

It was so fun to deliver this quilt. I’m so thankful for all Miss K. has done for each of my kids, but this year was particularly meaningful.  My 12-year-old was diagnosed with ADD last year. He has struggled in school for the past few years. In spite of having an extra-large class already, Miss K. made a huge difference to my son – his progress this year was amazing. The last week of school he found out his teacher had chosen him as Student of the Month for his class – this was the first time he’d been chosen since the 2nd grade. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t cry.

Three of my kids had another wonderful teacher over the years, Mrs. M, and we gave her this quilt (since it also went well with school colors!) Both of these women have blessed our family immensely. It was gratifying to give them something I made as a representation of my gratitude, but honestly, it was such a drop in the bucket compared to what I really owe them. Three cheers for good teachers!