The Solar System Quilt

 

I am happy to announce that my daughter, aka my darlin' daughter, just finished making a gorgeous quilt.  She's always been an artist and a crafter and now a great DIYer, but as far as fiber goes, she's been much more smitten with crochet and clothing than with quilting.

But quilting made its big debut because a new baby needs a great quilt.  The new baby in question is her boyfriend's brand new nephew.  The boyfriend loves astronomy, and the two of them planned a solar system quilt to introduce the new little one to his new home.

The project started on their visit here last summer, with fabric selection, interfacing, and cutting.  I'm happy to say that my super full sewing room made itself useful by supplying great fabrics for all the planets, sun and the asteroid belt, and even trims for the planetary rings.  I always love having my big stash get validated!

I have lots of moody, swirly print fabrics that provided great textures and colors to represent all the planets and the sun, complete with lots of sunspots.

Then she found this gorgeous outer space fabric online.

She finessed the layout, and then successfully completed pretty much her first machine appliqué (including a break to learn about cleaning and oiling for better stitch quality).  Here's the completed top.

And then she machine quilted the biggest thing she's ever quilted.  We had lots of Facetime meetings to explore and explain all sorts of technical things.

The result - a grand quilt that puts a huge smile on the face of this quilty mother!