Sunday, June 16, 2013

Soccer Quilt 2.0

La has been playing soccer a long time.  El has grown up going to soccer practices and games for her sister.  I think before she was born, we used to bring camp chairs to the game, but once I was going to games with two littles on my own, I needed an easy to carry, good for crawly babies solution.  So I made a soccer quilt. It's not precious - it was made out of scraps and yardage that I had on hand and a pillow case from Big Lots.  The scraps were mainly from this sea-themed quilt that I finished in April of 2008.
Watercolor Quilt

The following September (El was 10 mos. and walking), I finished this soccer quilt and we've used it tons.  It's not much to look at, but it's held up really well.
Front:
Soccer Quilt - Top

Back:
Soccer Quilt - bottom

It worked fine for a long time - basically, until El started playing on a team too.  For one thing, odds are good that the Pre-K games are before the dew is gone on the grass.  Two layers of cotton is no match for Saturday morning dew.  For the second thing, my husband (the coach) would have the players waiting to get back in the game sit all together on or near the quilt.  This would (understandably) kind of weird the kids out - they're not big on sitting with strangers.  They would sit on the wet grass right in front of the quilt.  [Sitting together in one place to wait has a couple of things going for it - it lets him know who is ready for a turn and he can easily see who is available to be a sub at any given time.  In Pre-K soccer, there can be a lot of politely declining the chance to play by the players.]

I finally decided this season that we really needed a second soccer quilt, so for some of the games, we brought one of the other quilts from the house - so the team could sit together on one quilt and La and I could sit on another.  One of the other things is that La is getting big, so our old soccer quilt really is turning into a 2 person quilt.

I cut a bunch of 12" wide pieces of varying lengths of fabric that was literally lying around.  I got bored with this pretty quickly and the end of the school year started and the project kind of stalled out.  I picked up an indoor/outdoor table cloth at TJMaxx/Homegoods to use for the back. Soccer Quilt - back

I think it's 60" x 108" - one of the larger sizes.  I considered also shower curtains and laminated cotton for the back.  I also considered just picking up another table cloth for the front or just using the table cloth as is.

There were a bunch of miscellaneous prints with not huge yardage that were usable (e.g. not earmarked for anything else) for this too.  (From top to bottom:  La's pillowcase fabric from her birthday party, soccer balls from El's pre-k teacher, comic book cover remnant, purple cupcake print from La's birthday party).  Also in the pile of prints were rainbow stars on black - it's 3 widths (selvage to selvage), 16", just to make it the same size as the table cloth.

Soccer quilt - top


It was assembled pretty quickly and then I used a pillowcase binding (no quilting, no batting) to put it together.  Since I tend to not lay stuff out and pin it together, this is what I did to keep it pretty true while sewing:  I started with the squarest corner and the shortest edge, sewing the (blue, stars) line.  Took it out of the machine and sewed the (blue, cupcake) line.  [see - this is why a CS degree and/or lots of math is handy - figuring out a notation for describing how to assemble a quilt.  I was also considering a line segment notation.  Stay in school, kids.] For line three, I flipped the quilt upside down (backing on top) and sewed the stars line.  The (cupcake, stars) line was left open.  Once the quilt was right side out, I top stitched it in zig zag, in pretty much the same order.  I closed the bottom by folding over the cotton side and tucking it around the backing, zig-zagging the length of it to close it.

 Soccer Quilt 2.0

This quilt concept would have been pretty striking with any of the following:  coordinating prints, a range of solids or liberal use of one solid.  However, it's starting to grow on me.  It was a fun exercise.

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