I began a completely different quilt for him using dark, spacey blues for a background:
Those photos show the patches laid out on my rug, but they are not yet quilted together or ironed. I imagined appliqueing a giant robot onto the background. But once I finished the patches for the back, I sat staring at my robot fabrics: solid grey, clocks, bright squiggles, printed geometrical grey.
I felt like I needed to be more of a painter than a quilter. Shortly after, I saw a link to the fabrics in this quilt. I was so disappointed I had already tried to create my own robot in space theme and was struggling so hard to put it together. I couldn’t let go of the money and time investment I had already made.
In the middle of April I went to a quilt workshop in Lancaster with my mom and while we were shopping I saw the fabrics live and in person. I could not, NOT pass them up. I didn’t have a pattern, and I had never bought fabric without a pattern. As a new quilter, I have basically no fabric stash. Luckily, one of the instructors at the workshop whipped up this neat little pattern for me and helped me cut it all out. Most of the off-set squares were cut at is, but three of them are fussy cut to ensure a full robot could be viewed. My mom helped me do the piecing and I had the top finished by the end of the week.
I basted this quilt while watching a movie and then began the amazingly humbling process of hand quilting. I don’t like hand quilting. I like picking fabrics and cutting and ironing and piecing, but the hours spent sitting with a tiny needle and thread looping in and out of this quilt were not fun. I quilted Xes across the four patch and a star from a template drawn by my sister in the off-set squares. I eventually cried uncle and brought the quilt down to my mom to ask for her help. She stayed up until one in the morning the night before I left her house in order to finish the hand quilting. The day I left she gave me instructions for the yellow binding and I headed back to Somerville hoping (against all of Nancy’s hopes) that the baby would not be born early.
I finished the quilt and washed it twice in Woolite and put it in a drawer far away from all the cat hair the night that Nancy went into labor. Luke made his parents wait two more days, but holy cow his cuteness made up for it.