The Star Wars T-Shirt Quilt That Took Four Years to Make

 

This post was originally published on Crafting a Green World way back in 2016.

Back in 2012, I showed off my Star Wars T-shirt quilt top to you. I told you all about how I'd constructed it over the past six months from thrifted Star Wars T-shirts that it had taken me years to collect. I shared details of the log cabin style that I'd used to piece it, and the color scheme that I'd selected that would enable me to best utilize my stash fabric. I told you that for my husband's birthday, I planned to back the finished top simply with flannel, then quilt it. 

When I said "birthday," I meant "anniversary," and when I said "planned," I meant that I would do it four years later. 

Four entire years later, here is the finished quilt! 

This quilt top has sat in my WIP pile for four years. We moved in that time, and I took it with me. We got a bigger bed, and I put off finishing it, dreading having to enlarge the quilt from a queen to a king. Several birthdays and anniversaries and Christmases passed, and I always found something else to give my husband. And then the new Star Wars movie came out (and if you haven't seen it, it's WONDERFUL!), and suddenly, there was all this Star Wars fabric in the fabric stores! 

Want to know a sure-fire way to get someone to finish a years-old WIP? Tell them that they get to buy themselves some new fabric to do it! 

Although the rest of the quilt is sewn entirely from thrifted and stash fabrics, it turned out that some new fabric was just the inspiration that I needed to finish this project up. I toyed with the idea of using my new Star Wars prints in flannel and cotton to add a border around the quilt, thereby resizing it to fit our king-sized bed, but everything that I tried looked janky. Finally, I decided that I'd rather have a quilt that I like the look of, even if it's too narrow to fit our bed, than a quilt that fits well but gets on my nerves every time I see it, and I used that new fabric, along with some stash, to piece the quilt back.

Because I want to use the quilt in the summer, I didn't use any batting between the layers. I put the front and back right sides together, sewed almost all the way around, then turned it and edge stitched the entire perimeter.

The quilt isn't even technically a quilt, because instead of quilting it, I tied it at all four corners of every T-shirt piece.  

Four years, my Friends, and in the end, this Star Wars T-shirt quilt took one day to finish. I can't wait to see what I'm going to accomplish in another four years!

A Dragon Quilt for a Dorm Room Bed

 

I almost had this quilt project well-organized.

I mean, I started it in July, with the intent to give it as a Christmas gift!

And then I finished about 90% of it, still in July! I did all the taxing piecing, and basted the batting and backing fabric to the quilt top. All I had left to do by the end of the month was applique/quilt the dragon to the quilt, then stitch the back-to-front binding.

So obviously that's what I was doing in a panic on December 24th...

Why, yes, completing a project in the same month that I begin it IS one of my 2023 New Year's Resolutions! I'll keep you in the loop about how it goes!

I got so much done in July because I was able to take advantage of Matt and one teenager swanning off to Peru for two weeks and the other teenager having, you know, an active social life and a part-time job, etc., leaving me, with no social life and no part-time job and no vacation out of the country, home alone in silence. 

Mental note that when my second kid leaves for college, as well, I should probably try to make some friends.

It was good, though, that I had so many uninterrupted hours to work, because some of these techniques were new to me. Here's the link for my dragon quilt inspiration. This was my first time using fusible interfacing as a template--

--which involves cutting pieces from my fabric stash--

--then ironing them to the interfacing--

--then zigzagging them in place--

--and then cutting and ironing some more!

Spots was, as usual, of great help:

She's pissed off because it's a drive-in night so she wasn't allowed outside. That's where the mean cars live!

My photo editing software automatically organizes my photos in chronological order, and it must have access to the timestamps for each photo, as well, because a funny thing happened with my catalog of these photos. I lent Matt my nice camera for their trip, so when he got back all those photos just fed into my program along with all the shitty cellphone pics I'd been taking, to such an extent that when we were clearly taking photos simultaneously, our photos interlaced in the catalog!

So while I was finishing up piecing the dragon's body onto my template--

--my teenager was sitting on a curb somewhere in Peru and eating an ice cream cone:

By the time I got that wing finished, several hours later--

--she was standing on the shore of Lake Titicaca!

And late that evening, when I'd finally gotten all of those interfaced scraps pieced together and had only the dinosaur's spikes left to cut out--

--she was enjoying a delicious dinner:

Here is exactly where I was in the process on the day they came home from Peru:

And there the project remained until December 24th. In other news, WHY does my sewing machine always do some random funky wonky thing every single time I'm panic sewing on a deadline? Do not look at the stitching that I used to quilt this dragon, because from the backside it looks like shit. I kept adjusting the freaking tension, I rethreaded the needle forty times, I changed the needle, I did everything but pray to the goddamned sewing machine, and I still have no idea why it wouldn't give me nice stitching on the back.

Whatever. It's far from perfect, but it IS finished!

Syd thinks it's cheezy that I chose a piece whose print looked like the dragon's eye, but I love it!

...and that's all the photos you get of just the quilt without the dog walking all over it.

She is very helpful, yes?

Fortunately, she only walked all over it in snowy paws, not muddy paws, so all I had to do was toss it in the dryer when I was done.

And that's the last big project until I drive my kid to Ohio, unless I get around to sewing her the matching laptop and ipad and phone cases that I bought the zippers for back in October... which I'm NOT going to get around to doing, ahem.

After all, I'll need something to fill my lonely hours while she's gone!

The Road Map Quilt is Finished!

 

Quilts intended to be given for a specific holiday are the BEST, because you have to finish them!

And that's how the giant denim log cabin quilt that I've been dreaming of for my own bed is still a WIP several years old, with the extra-wide red flannel that I bought to back it narrowly escaping from being accidentally used in every new project I think up, but this quilt, intended as a car play mat for my baby niece's birthday, went from idea to reality in the space of a single summer. 

It also happened to get WAY overengineered in the process, but whatever.

To see the quilt design as I thought it up and pieced it, check out this post where I show off my finished road map quilt top. 

After it was pieced, I needed to think up a few applique embellishments. I wanted the embellishments to hint at the purpose for each area--the park, the neighborhoods, the construction zones, the parking lots, the rivers, the roads, the oceans, the dino dig sites--without being too prescriptive. I wanted features that were naturally stationary, so no animals or vehicles. I had trouble figuring out all the pieces that I wanted, and I had trouble clearly explaining my vision, which led to the fun game of people trying to help me by suggesting ideas, and me going, "No. No. No. Nuh-uh. Not that. Um, no. Nope. Not that, either." 

Fun fact: that's actually my pet peeve when people do that to ME, so sorry!

I never did end up happy with my choices for the river (I don't think the piers look like piers) or the construction zones (I think these cones are oversized compared to the other elements)--

--but I love how everything else turned out. I used all stash for the applique pieces, and almost all materials upcycled from other garments, so I think there's a lot of fun texture variety that will appeal to a toddler. 

There's toweling for the beach!

And work pants, quilting cotton, and bias tape for the houses!

I like the idea that this will be both a play mat and a snuggly quilt. The cotton batting will be comfy on little knees, and cozy on little sleepyheads!

I don't know why I can never have any peace when I'm working on the floor. These photos are just a glimpse of ALL THE DRAMA that took place on this spot.

Jones was in the way and screaming his head off, so Syd thought she'd distract him by giving him some catnip off the hanging planter in the window. 

It distracted him, alright, but only to the extent that he rolled and ran around screaming all over my quilt that I was trying to trim, hollering for more catnip. 

And then Spots heard him and she came hunting for catnip, too, and then they both started hallucinating mice under the quilt and attacking it.

Here it is two episodes of Surviving Antarctica later:

During this time, I also learned that Will does NOT think that traveling on foot through Antarctica is a legitimate path of exploration, and especially not if you fly to the continent. And if you do go there and get stuck and nearly die, you nevertheless have no business asking a whaling vessel or a tug boat to pause its legitimate business to come save you and your crew, because you knew full well what you were getting everyone into.

So that's that, everyone! Please consult with Will before planning your next trek.

I barely had enough of that stash cotton batting for this quilt, and I'm going to be very sad the next time I start a new quilt and find myself having to buy new batting. But that's a problem for Future Julie! Present Julie also found a grey flat sheet in the stash that matches the grey flannel roads perfectly. I'd been holding onto that sheet because I thought it was the one that I was going to use to make the final blackout curtain in my bedroom, but I compared it to the other two curtains and it doesn't quite match, so

1. Where is the sheet that matches, so I can make that curtain?
2. Where did this sheet come from, and what did I intend to use it for?

Well, whatever it was meant to be, it's a quilt back now!

When it comes to quilting the lines on grey flannel roads, it's Frixion pens for the win!

I didn't even iron the marks away, just washed and dried the quilt and those marks and the chalk marks on the black flannel roads disappeared like magic!

A back-to-front blanket binding...

... and my road map quilt is finished!

But, of course, the most important question: is it fun?

Better get out the Hot Wheels and see:

It's fun!!!

Here are some cars parked in the bias tape parking lot:

And here are some in the park, parked by the waffle shirt and inside-out sweatshirt tree:

Because our baby niece lives in California, Matt designed her a palm tree, and I made it from some T-shirt and dress pants fabric and put it in the park:

The construction cones are blocking off the construction zone so that non-work vehicles stay out:

There are a couple of houses already in the neighborhoods, just waiting for some building block and LEGO neighbors:

And if you ever want to do some paleontology, this is the place to do it!

After work, you can drive to the beach to relax:

You might remember that for a while I was super worried that the quilt would be, just, ridiculously big--like, her parents have to have enough floor space to lay it down, for goodness' sake!--but now that it's finished, I don't think it's too large:

I mean, it IS pretty big--that's Matt's head just barely visible over the top of it, so it's a good six feet!

But the child simply HAS to have enough room to spread out. It's no fun if you can't spread out!

Syd suggested that for upcoming holidays, I should create quilts with different small world themes to connect to this one. Like, you could drive to the outer space quilt to the north, or the deep ocean quilt to the south. Perhaps a mountain range to the east, complete with castle and dragon?

Thinking up new ideas might be the best part of handmade presents!