This is a small wall quilt that I made for John the year the movie about Andy K. came out. I thought it would be timely to blog about it now as there’s still plenty of time to whip up a similar quilt for the holidays if you were so inclined. It’s pretty basic; just a piece of patchwork, a dimensional face/moon, and a scattering of glass beads. The finished piece is a case of the final result being way nicer than it’s component parts.

The trick that I used to make the patchwork background is pretty easy. Use a rotary cutter and quilting ruler to cut a bunch of squares then arrange them on light-weight fusable interfacing (fusible surface up, squares wrong side down). Here’s something you should do that I didn’t: draw at least two perpendicular guidelines on the interfacing to help keep your work square. They even sell fusible now with a grid pre-printed on it (which they didn’t when I made this). When you get the arrangement the way you want it; fuse the squares in place. Ta-da! One piece ready to quick zip up all the seams. I incorporated a dowel pocket into the lining/backing to keep the quilt from sagging and sewed on a metal ring for hanging.

Then there’s the moon/face that I made from a picture of Andy. I printed it the size I wanted on photo paper and mounted it with heavy duty iron-on glue to a piece of mat board. Then I trimmed it out with an exacto knife and sealed it with a couple of light coats of clear Krylon spray paint. I used hot melt glue (hi-temp) to attach three flat round shank buttons to the back which serve double duty to both attach the face to the quilt and also hold it out a bit from the fabric surface for more dimension. I painted the hardened glue and the back of the buttons with Scribbles fabric paint to make it look nicer and blend with the dark background. Then I used several strands of heavy button thread to tie the face on (marking on the back where each of the three buttons would fall so I’d know where to stab through). Make your strands longer than you need for tieing, stab them all through and then pull them all tight and tie off; really it’s much easier than trying to do each button in turn.

All in all, these are a couple of very versatile tricks that could be used and adapted to make a wide variety of wall quilts and other fabric objects. The picture on board trick is best used for objects that only get light handling — try iron-on transfer to fabric mounted on thick felt for stuffies and other medium to heavy use projects.

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