I Made Quilted Stationery Sets for the Class of 2024 Because It Would Kill Me To Simply Give Them Gift Cards

Did I tell you that we have construction people in the house AGAIN?!?

We're rounding in on the one-year anniversary of that time that a tree fell on our house, but considering that the roof people didn't even finish that job until well into winter, and that thanks to that nightmare we have not had a single year without a construction project since 2020, I feel like I should probably replace the disused menu board in my kitchen with a sign that reads, "It's been [#] Days Since We've Last Had Construction People in the House."

This current construction project actually stems from the 2022 project of replacing the hideous floors in the kids' bedrooms. When the workers ripped out the floor in the older kid's room, they saw a ton of water damage on one exterior wall and they theorized that the old concrete porch out there might be funneling water towards the house. Sometimes this company will add on another project to the one we already hired them to do--that's how we got the kids' bathroom floor retiled!--but we had to get back in line for this one. It was a LONG line, I guess, since our turn has just come up again, but it's for the best, probably, since, you know, it took us half of 2023 to get a roof back on our house!

I was sort of afraid this porch project would result in them having to rip out and remake all the exterior walls facing the porch, since that's generally how our luck has run, but this time we were lucky! None of the water damage needed anything that extensive, none of the termite damage(!!!) turned out to be current, and the porch didn't even need to be repoured. Instead, we've got some brand-new watertight sealing on the exterior walls around the porch, and all-new termite- and water-free wood inside. And the guy putting on the siding only got stung by wasps twice.

And because you never want to let these guys leave when you've got them here (remember that long line!), my partner got them to agree to fix a shockingly janky wall in the older kid's bedroom, so to circle back around to my first sentence, THAT'S why we've got workers in the house right now. 

And the whole point of that story is that I'm too bashful to sew in the room that the wall guy has to pass through 40,000 times per day, so instead of doing this project leisurely over the course of a week, as I'd envisioned, I instead panic-sewed most of it during the day he got called to a different site, thoroughly warping my personality by listening to my fairy smut on headphones the entire time. 

My idea was that I would quilt each graduate a set of postcards and stamp them, but 1) the price of postcard stamps is now so high that you might as well just buy regular Forever stamps, and 2) my partner and older kid both thought that my quilted postcards, while they really are a thing that can be mailed, were so nice that the recipients would fret at tossing them willy-nilly in the mail as-is. So although I kept the postcard format, my older kid helped me make envelopes for them out of our stash scrapbook paper ("Are we EVER going to use up all this paper?!?" she groused, but to be fair, this single pad of 12"x12" paper *has* seemed to pop up in every paper project we've done since about 2010 or so!), and I pre-stamped them for college student mailing convenience. 

My favorite thing about these postcards is how they serve as a sort of sampler for all the patchwork techniques I currently know. Here are some triangle hexies:

That batik canvas is from the first curtains I ever sewed!

Here are a variety of log cabins:

These are actually all postage square quilt blocks I made over a decade ago... before I learned how to sew a straight seam and properly square things, ahem:

And these are new postage stamp quilt blocks made from stash, because I'm still in the habit of cutting and saving 1.5" pieces from my last bits of scraps whenever I sew:

Inside this quilt block is the very last square inch of the purple striped fabric that used to be the ring sling that was my very first sewing project ever. I wore both my babies in it!

And here's my newest-to-me technique, the quilt-as-you-go method!

And because my NEWEST newest-to-me technique isn't quilting but gif-making, here's a gif of all my quilted postcards--I've learned how to slow down the frame rate, so it's not quite as obnoxious as my quilted coasters gif:

And here's all the envelopes ready to be stuffed!

I sewed zippered pouches to hold the stationery sets, a nice pen, and a glue stick since my homemade envelopes aren't self-sealing, ahem. 

Most of these stationery sets are now with their recipients, ready to have records of college adventures written on them and sent off to loved ones. I kind of want to see what it would look like to put a quilted patchwork front onto a single-fold greeting card, though, and I also want to make a few more of these postcards for myself, because in my experience, college students like to receive mail even more than they like to send it!

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!