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My son got his undergraduate degree at Xavier University - and he is now working on his masters degree

I am making him a tshirt quilt for christmas. I am thinking about how to quilt and I wondered about quilting Xs for Xavier. But I have never really seen quilting with Xs to copy off of

Have any of you seen quilting motifs that were Xs? I also kind of think about quilting in the words Xavier Musketeers, but I am not sure if I have that much talent

Any ideas?

Thanks

I would love to see the quilt. I am no good without an image. If you are only wanting to make X's, then maybe look at different fonts and upsize to fit your quilting area. You could make different X's in all the different parts of the quilt. or write out the whole name in different fonts.

I have seen people write or print it out on regular paper, then use that as a pattern and sew through the paper. I would make a fairly tight stitch, so that it won't come out when you pull the paper off. They have those pads of paper at some of the dollar stores, I think they call them sketch pads. The paper is similar to newsprint paper and is much easier to pull off. A light box would help you make the same pattern over and over.

Don't be afraid of "writing" on your quilt. Cursive writing is a natural for us because we learned it when young and the muscle memory is there. I like writing in plain borders. Recently made a quilt with a rainbow panel and wrote the opening lines to "Somewhere over the rainbow" in the framing borders. The biggest inconvenience was turning the quilt on the LA to get the vertical rows horizontal to "write".

I'll be making some alphabet quilts where I use fabric for each letter and then quilt in the appropriate letter as well. Lucky for you, X isn't too terrible to figure out or coloring books are a great place to find things like that. In a t-shirt quilt I'd probably outline an X through each individual t-shirt block, with the width at least 1" wide.

Because of my vision issues I often mark my quilting designs on paper and quilt through it. When/if you use paper to sew/quilt through, I really like the parchment paper I get at the dollar store. A roll is 1 foot wide by 25 feet long, it's clear enough to see through and tough enough to hold up. When you need a bunch of template sheets, the easy answer is to draw out your design and then tape together (using blue tape with a tab or two on each side) maybe up to 6-8 sheets of paper and simply sew through them without using thread in your machine (I change my needles often and always after sewing through paper). You will be able to see the punches just fine. When you are just marking the designs on paper, I'd use a reasonably large stitch (8-10 per inch), when I've used small stitches it pretty much cuts through the paper and I have problems with my presser foot going through and tearing the paper before I'm ready. It does take time to rip off the paper and it's a bit messy but it lets me do complex designs that I can actually see -- and the nice thing is that there are no marks on your quilt top to take off or for people to see my lack of accuracy!

Every T-shirt quilt that I’ve made, even with good stabilization has been difficult to quilt in a “fancy” pattern. So I have used simple straight line quilting in large patterns with success. I use blue painter’s tape to mark my sewing lines and don’t sew on the tape as it is reusable.

Something to keep in mind is that you don't want to quilt over any heavy silkscreening or plastic on the T shirts. I always quilt around them... saving lots of trouble. I don't know how that might or might not work with your quilting "X's" allover.

Maybe a crosshatched border? Thereby making "X's"?