I've been working on a robot quilt for Mr. J for roughly a year now. He's obsessed with all things robot or wheels (and lately cats, but that's another story) or gears. It took me 6 months to find all the fabrics I wanted for what I envisioned as an epic quilt. I wanted mainly primary colors with a few odd balls thrown in. I also wanted only non-creepy robots and not space robots. I had to give in on the space robots. There were too many cute fabric that had a little bit of space stuff.
I wanted to make it large enough that it would act like a comforter and drape over the edges of a twin bed all the way to the floor so we wouldn't need a dust ruffle. I hate dust ruffles. They seems to trap dust under the bed which is just gross when you consider the amount of dog hair that comes in and out of our lives.
Anyway, I was given the book Patchwork Style for Christmas. I had largely finished gathering fabric by that point so I selected and modified a pattern from the book and started in. The fabric is cut in strips of similar sizes and then randomly sewn together in long strips. The strips were then sewn together on the long edge. Mr. J helped me select the order to sew the individual pieces together. It lead to some color pooling, but it is his quilt and someday I'll tell him how we sewed the quilt together.
I know that making the quilt myself was more expensive than buying something, but we have an old red blanket that someone in my family made a long time ago. We've now patched it several times because I love that thing so much. You don't generally save store bought quilts. They don't develop the fabric equivalent of a patina-the super soft cuddly state that fabric gets too when it's really old
The final size is slightly longer than a traditional queen size quilt and roughly the width of a full size quilt. For perspective, the top picture has it laying on a full size bed. I've sewed the quilt top together, but I realized halfway through that my machine wasn't big enough to do the final quilting. Luckily, there are several local quilters who have the fancy long arm sewing machines you need to sew a quilt of this size. I'm dropping off the quilt for it's final step this week.
I know that making the quilt myself was more expensive than buying something, but we have an old red blanket that someone in my family made a long time ago. We've now patched it several times because I love that thing so much. You don't generally save store bought quilts. They don't develop the fabric equivalent of a patina-the super soft cuddly state that fabric gets too when it's really old
The final size is slightly longer than a traditional queen size quilt and roughly the width of a full size quilt. For perspective, the top picture has it laying on a full size bed. I've sewed the quilt top together, but I realized halfway through that my machine wasn't big enough to do the final quilting. Luckily, there are several local quilters who have the fancy long arm sewing machines you need to sew a quilt of this size. I'm dropping off the quilt for it's final step this week.
Hopefully, it should be done by mid-July. I'm so excited to see what it looks like!
Seconded!
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