Remember Hawkeye from the TV show M.A.S.H.?  Wasn’t he from Iowa?  You know the little guy who liked Nehi soda?

*Editor’s Note: A couple of hours after I published this, I realized it was Radar who was from Iowa and who also liked Nehi.  Hawkeye was the character played by Alan Alda (his eyes kind of do look like hawk eyes, don’t they?).  I must have been channeling your thoughts when I realized I was wrong, so I apologize.  This is a good example of why we should question what we read.

Little did I know when I watched that show that the University of Iowa’s mascot is (a) Hawkeye.  My friend, Elaine, made this T-shirt quilt for her son.  Isn’t it cool?

You know what is even more cool?  This!

I can see you now with that confused look on your face.  Well, this is the backing fabric.  It is obvious which way is up on the quilt top, but on the back, one could easily overlook the direction of the mascots’ faces and just throw the quilt backing on the frame without another thought until… you’ve completed the quilting and took the quilt off the frame.  By that point, the quilting and the damage is done.  You either live with it or pick out all the stitching.  So, I can’t tell you how grateful I was to Elaine for putting this tape on the top side of the backing fabric.  I wanted to hug her for doing this!  But, she lives a couple of states away, so I didn’t.  But, if you are reading this, Elaine, THANK YOU!!!

All Elaine asked for on this quilt was simple meandering all over and curvy, back-and-forth lines in the sashings.  I was surprised how relaxing the mindless meandering was to quilt; nothing to worry about with making sure it was going to work.  Because it did!  It matches the backing fabric and goes very well with the fabrics on the top.

I asked her to tell me a bit about her son, so I could make this more personal for him, and she said he likes sports, specifically basketball and football.  I quilted a basketball in the quilt in the picture above and a football in the picture below, but they are really hard to see.

So, since that gray T-shirt seemed to “need” something besides meandering quilted there, I decided to put a basketball and a football in that block.  When I took the quilt off the frame, that basketball didn’t look right.  Then I looked at a picture of a basketball and realized it needed a line down the middle, otherwise it looks like a baseball.  So, back on the frame it went and down the middle that line was stitched.

No matter how simple or how difficult a quilt is to quilt, I love them all.  And, I have to admit, I had a lot of fun quilting this T-shirt quilt.  Elaine does such a nice job of piecing; that makes my job a lot easier!