Iris and Matt

T-shirt quilts are usually rigid gridded affairs, so what do you do when you’re retiring from more than 20 years in umpiring women’s softball, are being inducted into the National Softball Hall Of Fame, and need a quilt that incorporates 23 t-shirts from your career? You need dynamic and energized. Plain and gridded won’t do.

Remember the days when people would put travel stickers on their suitcases from places they’d visited? The writing didn’t all need to be facing the same way. That was Iris and Matt’s vision for their quilt: decals stuck on at random. They wanted something with a lot of power and life. In the softball world, umpires are referred to as blue as in “Hey Blue, over here.” Uniforms are navy and powder blue so those are the base colors to show off the t-shirt designs in this unusual celebratory quilt.