Alright, let’s celebrate the Oscar! When Rae asked if I wanted to participate in this year’s Celebrate the Boy series on her blog I hopped on board because it’s been about a year that I’ve had a pile of fabric set aside for a lego themed quilt for Oscar and I thought this would be a kick in the pants to get it done.
The boy is no stranger to themed quilts. He started out life driving cars on his racetrack quilt, then I cut up all his baby clothes and made them into the wonkiest but one of my, along with Phoebe’s, most cherished quilts. When we moved into our house we painted his room green and I made him a new vehicle themed quilt to go in his big boy room. This quilt has been off the bed for a year or so and I’ve been waiting for inspiration to hit.
Legos and quilting seem like such a perfect match. I couldn’t resist. I’d have loved to do it way smaller scale but to keep it manageable I went with a 4″ square for a 1×1.
I started out trying to free motion quilt around the bumps and it was just too hard to make it look neat so I stitched in ditch quilted it. I might at some point go back and hand quilt around the bumps.
I used a carvable eraser (mastercarve) to make a lego bump stamp and used permanent ink stamp pads in charcoal to stamp the legos. I used a light gray on the black.
I made a little mock up model of the quilt with legos but once I started cutting out the pieces I realized it was too time consuming to try to follow it exactly so I just cut out 2×2 and 2×3 and 1×1 and 4×4 and 2×8 and 1×8, all with 1/2″ extra for 1/4″ seam allowance on all sides. I put little masking tape diagrams of which piece they were on there to help when I laid it out. It worked out really well. I was surprised. And the stamping went smoothly. And the quilting. Actually the most frustrating part of this whole project was probably cleaning Oscar’s dang disgusting disaster of a room so I could take a photo of the quilt in there.
If you have any other questions about the quilt let me know! Oh, I bought half a yard of each color fabric but should have just got a yard of each. I took a baggie of legos with me to the fabric store to pick the right colors. I wouldn’t try to do it online.
I’m thinking this might be it for him for themed quilts. He can take a lego quilt off to college with him, right?
