DC Super Heroes Quilt - Girl Power

DC Super Heroes - Girl Power

I've been gather super heroes fabrics for a couple of years. My wife asked me to make a female super heroes quilt and I had several DC Wonder-Woman, Bat-Girl, and Super-Girl fabrics.

The pattern I created for this quilt was based on a 1940s St Patrick's Day tablecloth we were using in our holiday display.

I experimented a bit trying to reproduce the tablecloth's detail in the intersections. To see the detail, the stripe sets had to be huge, so I decided to go to a simpler design with just a merge of the two stripes sets.

The problem with this was aligning the fabrics, especially the 1/4 stripes, resulted in a really poor looking section. I scrapped that idea and instead went with the smaller bordered Super Hero squared at the intersection. This worked out great. The stripe widths in the original tablecloth are the same in the quilt.

My wife and I discussed the border. Going all blue just seemed wrong. It would have been too heavy. I searched my Patriotic/4th of July fabric and found a bunch of fat quarters of this red/white/blue stars fabric. It seemed like a good match. It did take a little calculating to determine the width of the border based on the amount of fabric I had. I carefully cut this fabric along the stripe edges to ensure a consistent look around the quilt.

The quilt backed is pieced with blue because I didn't enough yardage of this Super Girls fabric. The binding is the matching blue.

And the quilt is quilted with stitch in the ditch ( or close enough).

Trip Around the World Quilt Pattern

You might think the "Trip Around the World" quilt pattern is simple. In some ways, you are correct. It is just a simple grouping of fabric strips cut apart and reassembled. There are essentially two ( or 3) areas of difficulty.
1st is choosing the order of the fabrics. With some groups of fabrics, this may not be an issue. In others, the order is very important. A slow fading between dark and light fabrics makes the pattern stand out better than dark-light-dark-light-etc.

2nd is aligning the fabrics on reassembly. While I usually do not use pins, I use pins when sewing together these types of quilts. Aligned squares look much better in a finished quilt.

3rd is optional. If you have fabrics that have a notion of up and down and you care that your quilt had an up and down (as scene when holding upright), then you must sew 2 groupings of strips. One grouping with the fabric order ascending and one with the fabric order descending.

I tend to make these quilts requiring the 3rd option. Here are a couple of my themed around the world quilts. I'll add a 3rd quilt in a couple of days. All of these quilts have been professionally quilted by a local Long-arm quilter.

Halloween Themed Quilt

St Patrick's Day Themed Quilt

Close-up

Showing back/binding.

Valentine's Day Quilt:

Close up on center and quilting:

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