Hawkeye Finish

One of my coworkers is a HUGE Iowa Hawkeyes football fan and has been asking me to make him a quilt for the last 4 years now. If I could make a quilt for everyone who asks me, I would, but then I'd never get to a place of making a business of quilting (which I'm still wanting to do).

So how did he get so lucky? It's called the barter system. We made a trade of goods - he provides me with free parking vouchers for when my husband and I go to see the Broadway series shows and I make him a mini that had something to do with the Iowa Hawkeyes. He gave me absolute freedom to do what I wanted so I started looking at the logos online until I found the one I liked, with the logo inside of the capital letter I.

This project challenged me in 3 ways: I've never really done satin stitching to this degree. I can say that I'm now much more comfortable with it and I completely understand the need for a stabilizer.  This was also my first time trying a 3/4-inch wide single fold binding using this tutorial and it worked perfectly! Of course, using this method meant that I would have to hand stitch the binding onto the back which was also a first for me but I managed to do it and by the end, I felt pretty comfortable with doing it.

I kept the quilting very simple, just straight lines a 1/2-inch apart throughout most of it. If you look closely at the bottom though, you can see the outline of the word IOWA, in the university's trademark font. For that to pop, I did matchstick quilting. I tried getting a photo of it, but I just couldn't get it to read very well on camera.

The mini measures 20 x 24 and will be gifted during our next work shift together.