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!

WIP: I Finished Piecing the Road Map Quilt Top

 Matt refers to this as "mission creep."

My original objective was to make my baby niece, who likes cars, a simple little roll-up road play mat. 

Then I got left at home alone for too long, started a five-hour podcast about a school group that got stranded on Mount Hood, and things... got out of hand.

This is the Fishing Net quilt pattern. I'm not proud of my visual design sense (although I do think it's improved over the years), so thank goodness that one of my kids has a GREAT visual design sense and the patience to hold my hands and reassure me as I continually disturb her to ask things like, "Would it be weird to have some black roads and some grey roads?" or (holding up several coloring pages of this quilt pattern that I have filled in with crayon) "Do you like the way I colored it here better, or do you like this one better? Or this one?"

She liked the alternating grey and black roads better, so that's the way I started planning it!

I DID iron all my fabric, but animals kept lying down on my layout and then the robot vacuum got into it, as well.

Syd was also required to look at every piece of flannel that I own and help me come up with believable prints and colors for a road map, then lay them where they ought to go:

Here we have a park, two neighborhoods, two construction zones for the epic mini Tonka trucks I bought her, and a ginger cat without a thought in his head:

Now I've added a couple of rivers, a couple of parking lots, a dino dig site, and an ocean:

And now I've got everything!

I was actually just finishing cutting out the pieces for this quilt as Matt and Will pulled into the driveway, home from Peru. Neither of them are big communicators, especially when they travel, so imagine my surprise when instead of coming straight in for hugs and celebrations and snuggling on the couch, Matt backed away from me when I met them on the driveway and asked for a COVID test.

And then imagine how I felt when both their COVID tests were so chock-full of COVID that they pulled up that dreaded second line right away. By the time the fifteen-minute timer actually went off, I'd already partitioned off part of the house, fetched the air mattress and extra sheets and towels, and was busy sobbing quietly to myself in the bathroom.

Friends, let's follow Grandma's on the Roof rules with your loved ones: if you're traveling and wearing your mask like a baller but have to take a six-hour bus ride with some maskless stranger wetly coughing behind you the entire time, maybe just, you know, go ahead and tell your loved one at home that. And then a couple of days later, when you're finally heading home and you arrive at the Chicago airport and you've got just a four-hour drive ahead of you and you start thinking, "Huh, I'm starting to feel kind of crappy," maybe just shoot your loved one a quick text along the lines of "Hey, feel like shit, COVID tests on the driveway before hugs!" That way your loved one, who's barely seen two sentences in a row out of you for the past two weeks and misses you a LOT, can, you know, modulate her excitement with some fair warning.

I mean, hypothetically.

ANYWAY, you know what spending the entire next day after a huge disappointment disassociating from your sadness does for you?

It makes you SUPER PRODUCTIVE!

The instructions had me piece big triangles as if they were log cabin quilt blocks. It was a little tricky to wrap my head around, but I only had to pull out the seam ripper once, so yay for me!

So then the quilt actually comes together as four big triangles, with that one road that runs corner to corner pieced last as a sash:

Especially considering that I wasn't really able to picture how it would look pieced, even with all the pieces laid out (darn my visual-spatial thinking deficits!), I am SO happy with how this road map quilt top turned out!

My next visual-spatial reasoning challenge is to add just enough applique road map embellishments to give a hint as to the purpose of each different part of the map, without having the embellishments look tacky or ugly or overwhelming or too restrictive.

The Fantasy Quilts I'm Working On because Everyone Has Left Me Home Alone

Syd and I have pretty big plans while Matt and Will are taking a graduation trip to Peru. They may be going to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca and tasting chocolate and pisco, but Syd and I bought a month of Disney+ and checked Stardew Valley out of the library. So. We're pretty well set.

We've also been keeping the house really, really clean, because we are not the messy ones, and it's really, really quiet, because Syd doesn't get up until noon and sometimes works in the evenings and other times has sleepovers with friends. 

So. I've been pretty much going stir-crazy.

I've gotten way too invested in this history of salt that I'm reading, and I've gotten WAY ahead on my freelance writing schedule (synchronized with getting WAY behind on getting paid, so that's fun), and dang, has it turned out to be a week for quilting!

Above is the quilt that I'm sewing Will for her dorm room bed. She's not going off to college until January, so I've got plenty of time (and it's actually going to be one of her Christmas presents, so don't tell!), but it's also fiddly as hell, involves a couple of new-to-me techniques, Will's not here to get a peek at it and spoil the surprise, and I'm bored.

I started off trying to directly copy this Lily the Dragon quilt, and you can see that I'm using that exact template, too, but then I got way into the weeds and it looks super different entirely because I do not know that ticker tape technique the author references and could not figure it out. 

Fortunately, I think that what I did end up doing, which was just ironing fabric scraps willy-nilly to interfacing, looks fine and probably better suited to my kid's grown-up nerd girl aesthetic than the look in the original blog post. Also, Syd helped me with the color arrangement of the wings, because I never mastered my preschool Montessori sensory work. 

I bought the grey Kona cotton background fabric and the black flannel backing fabric, but the entire dragon is made from scraps and stash. I tried to stick mostly to quilting cottons, but the white spikes (and yes, each spike is a completely novel shape so each one had to be numbered, traced, numbered again, cut out, traced again, numbered again, and cut out again ugh) are some kind of dimensional bottomweight leftover from a pair of pants Syd cut up for some Trashion/Refashion Show garment once upon a time. And hiding there in the blue wings are pieces of a flannel shirt and a skirt that my tiny youngling child once wore. 

I did the same thing for this quilt below:

That black flannel is what I didn't need for Will's quilt backing, that grey flannel was in my stash but uncut so I KNOW I must have bought it for something specific (oops!), but all the rest of the flannel is scraps, including my greatest triumph, that brown that I had exactly enough left of for just those half-square triangles. 

Most of that other flannel is leftover from the Great Jammy Pants Craze of 2014. 

I don't know if you can even tell what this quilt is supposed to be, but basically, it's me deciding that my baby niece might like one of those road play mats for her upcoming birthday. 

And then I got left alone in the house for too long and I went overboard. 

Like, why a felt play mat, when a quilted cotton play mat would be so much more versatile and sturdier? 

And if I'm doing what's essentially a quilt, I might as well make it an actual quilt size so it's even more versatile. 

I love this one, so I'll just buy the pattern and copy it. 

And now I'll spend the entire day going through my flannel scraps and figuring out which ones look vaguely road play mat-themed. 

Syd had to come to my rescue with her design sense superpower again, but I think I got it nailed down. Green is going to be a park, green plaid is going to be neighborhoods, brown is for construction zones (and maybe a dinosaur dig site), black plaid is parking lots, and blue is water. I picked out some interesting scraps that I can use as applique fabrics to add trees and houses and whales and dino bones.

I think I made it WAY too big, though. It's only a throw, but a throw size seems really dramatic for a road play mat. 

Oh, well. You don't want the world's largest play mat, then don't leave me to my own devices for this long! 

I Made Rainbow Fibonacci Placemats, Because It's My Pandemic Hobby

 

I've been obsessed with rainbows (it's like alphabetizing for colors!) and math (so many patterns, so many puzzles, so many correct answers that it's possible to suss out!) forever, and teaching myself how to make my niece's Sierpinski triangle quilt also got me obsessed with how satisfying it is to sew absolutely perfect seams and angles and iron them just so and end up with a creation that's gloriously precise.

Add in a nice long podcast, preferably in the true crime genre, and nowhere else to be and nothing else to do but sew and listen, and I'm as happy as a clam can be while remaining socially isolated and terrified of the ongoing global pandemic...

And we actually DID need placemats! I Googled around for a while trying to find a pattern I liked, but I don't like anything floral or cutesy or too curvy, I'm not in the mood for something novelty or pop culture, and the only color schemes I really like are galaxy and rainbow, because I am ten years old. I was about to just put the whole project on the back burner when I suddenly thought, "Ooh, I could sew the Fibonacci sequence just like I did when I made my Fibonacci quilt, and stop on a number that's the perfect size for a placemat!"

"Let's see... how many different squares would that give me.... OMG SEVEN?!?!?!?"

And the rainbow Fibonacci placemat is born!

Don't those squares, sewn so precisely and ironed nice and sharp, soothe that tense pit in the bottom of your stomach?

And don't you find that concentrating on cutting and pinning the layers together and matching everything up just perfectly requires so much focus that there's no room for any actual original thoughts in your head?

So pretty! So orderly!

And isn't it nice to quilt such nice, straight lines while listening to the behind-the-scenes story of the Chippendale dancers?

And doesn't it make your kid's ravioli soup, ripe peach, and half a homemade pumpkin chocolate chip cookie look elegant instead of the result of you 1) cleaning out the freezer and 2) foisting off the last of the canned goods you panic-bought almost exactly one year ago today because it was practically the only thing still on the shelves at THE HARDWARE STORE (stay classy, Midwest!)?

Also, both that placemat and table are kinda dirty. I'd warn you not to look too closely, but I suspect you already knew I'm not landing on the cover of Good Housekeeping anytime soon...

I'm so happy with how these placemats turned out!

I wanted to make more, but we don't actually *need* anymore (especially not if I'm going to make myself a whole other set out of rainbow prints, ahem...), so I made a rainbow Fibonacci placemat listing in my Pumpkin+Bear shop, because making them for other people is just as fun!

Anyway, I suppose that mathematical rainbow-themed quilting is as good of a pandemic hobby as anything else!

P.S. The Fibonacci Sequence makes a great homeschool math unit!

My DIY Rainbow Sierpinski Triangle Quilt

 

I'm probably supposed to tell you that the best thing I've ever made is my children. 

And don't get me wrong, because they're super great, but 1) I'm pretty sure that they actually made themselves out of nonsense, candy, and pig-headedness; and 2) they are NOT a completed rainbow Sierpinski triangle patchwork quilt!

I LOVE this thing. It's, like, the perfect distillation of most of my favorite things: colors lined up nice and orderly, sewing, math, and picky little details that it's almost but not quite possible to get absolutely perfect.

If only I could somehow combine it with reading, cats, and hot chocolate spiked with matcha and Bailey's, I'd be gone right now because I'd have reached Nirvana. Oh, and literal Nirvana would be there playing for me, too.

When you last left me thisclose to Nirvana, I had completed the beautiful rainbow quilt top. I was pretty pleased with myself for being so far ahead in my homemade Christmas gift game that I then complacently did other things for a month, then was all, "Crap! Christmas is this month and the Incompetent Narcissist in Chief has made a shambles of the post office! I should probably get my gifts in the mail so that I can start fretting about them being lost in the mail!"

To finish my rainbow Sierpinski triangle quilt, I sewed a .5" sash to the perimeter, added a cotton batting layer, and then backed it with one piece of black Kona cotton (I LOVE extra-wide fabric!). I added an extra 2" to the backing fabric on all sides so that I could make a back-to-front binding on the quilt. 

I really, really, REALLY struggled with what thread color to use for quilting--first-world problems, amiright? I consulted my teenagers, who were sarcastic and unhelpful--thanks a LOT, Kids!--and with Matt, who was probably helpful but I didn't like anything that he said. I finally decided to stitch-in-the-ditch around every triangle with white thread on the top and black thread on the bobbin...

...and now what I wish I'd ACTUALLY done was use black thread on the top and bottom and only stitch-in-the-ditch around the black triangles. The problem is that I don't super love the look of quilting--gasp, I know!--and I always want the lowest-profile, least-distracting-to-the-patchwork method. 

It might have worked if I wasn't shitty loose with my stitching in the ditch, but I don't like seeing the white thread breaking up my rainbow triangles:

Oh, well. It's done now. And I'd probably be a little sad if I didn't have an excuse to make another entire quilt just to have another go at one small and fiddly detail.

Anyway, what I actually feel is total love for the pretty quilt that I have accomplished! Here, have some more photos of it!

I am 100% going to make myself one of these now, both as an excuse to make it even more perfect this time, and because *I* want one! And then I'm probably going to list one in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, because I quite enjoyed the challenge of sewing this and wouldn't mind making some more.

I think I want to play with different rainbow patterning to see if I can achieve true rotational symmetry, and I might see if I can come up with a more creative rainbow pattern than just rotational symmetry, as well. I also sort of want to buy this coloring book and try to recreate some of the mathematical patterns in it, because if Sierpinski triangles make an awesome quilt, then what else might?!?

And I am for SURE going to try quilting my next one with black thread on the top and bottom. My new rule of thumb is that whenever I'm debating between black thread or not-black thread, I should choose black thread.