The beginning of this latest project was sort of an accident. My son, who is two years old, discovered a fascination with my sewing machine and wanted to watch it go. What was I to do, but make it go? I had a couple of charm packs (pre-cut 5″ squares) laying around, including a vibrant Kaffe Fasset collection that I had no plans to do anything specific with, so I just started randomly sewing them together. It would be easy to take them apart later if I wanted, and Q just loved hearing the purr of my lovely Juki machine, watching the needle go up and down.

At the conclusion of his attention span for this particular activity, I had a lovely, large, colorful square that just begged to become something exciting. I’d been mulling over doing a silhouette drawing-style quilt for a while, so LIGHTBULB. I looked through my camera roll, and what do I find? This gem.

I mean, look at that sweet little overbite. And what’s more, the bright clashing colors perfectly match his personality, so I made a line drawing of his profile from the photo and went to Kinkos to enlarge it to fit my big square. By which I mean of course that I went to FedEx Office to enlarge it to fit my big square.

I used the line drawing as a template to cut the fabric, then picked out a navy solid to lay it over. Hand turn appliqué takes time, but its fairly meditative and gives more control, so off I went with my back pillow and my needle and the Great British Baking Show. Needless to say, this was all accomplished while Q was asleep, cuz duh. After finishing the appliqué, I put it under my machine and drew a blank, so I left it for some weeks and then over Christmas I finally quilted it. The background emanates from the profile in a sort of psychedelic rippling manner, and the quilting on the colorful print just emphasizes the shapes that are already there since I didn’t want to take away from the beautiful fabric prints.

A ba voila.