Harry Potter Quilt

This was a commission from a friend. As you can see, she is clearly a Harry Potter fanatic, but so am I! This was fun because I liked being able to work in all of the house colors. It was harder than I thought it would be to make sure I had the exact colors. The reference pictures were so varied. I remember fussing a lot over the Gryffindor shade of red and the Ravenclaw shade of blue. It didn’t help that the quidditch robes had some variations from the house colors as well.

The crests were a neat challenge. I decided to play it authentic and use the crest images from the books. I printed them out on fabric, ironed on fusible interfacing, and then ironed them onto black felt. After that I simply appliqued them into the center of their house colors checkerboard. I was trying to mimic the style of my letter jacket from high school, but if I had it to do over again I might just stick with a simple crest shape for the black felt part.

The Hogwarts “H” in the center was supposed to be simple, but my printer refused to print out the “H” any darker than a medium gray. I simply couldn’t get it black, so I went in with black t-shirt paint and colored in the H to make it stand out like it should.

By far the hardest and most time-consuming aspect of this project was the quote. She chose a quote from Sirius Black.

“We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”

The quilter in me was annoyed that the quote had unnecessary words in it, especially as that meant anywhere from 20-30 extra minutes of work for each word. The English teacher in me was annoyed because good writing is usually streamlined. All I could do was remind myself that the wizarding world does not have copies of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style at Flourish and Blott’s. *All jokes aside, the quote is excellent and true as the day is long. To make the quote, I brought in the stripes of black fabric to my school and traced the letters with quilter’s chalk onto the fabric. I’d heard hairspray can help keep it from rubbing off, so I sprayed it generously afterwards. From there, I had to use a light interfacing to keep the words from puckering. I set my sewing machine to the close zigzag stitch that I like to use when pretending my machine is an embroidery machine. I traced the letters, taking extra care on the curves. I used a Calibri font to make sure I had the simplest version of the letters so they’d have a clean look.

My friend had suggested the whole quote be in the Harry Potter style font, but I wasn’t so sure that would look good overall as it would be hard to read, especially with me not using a real embroidery machine. But I hate saying no, so I suggested we use that font for the quote source at the end. So if you look closely, you’ll notice that “Sirius Black” is done in a different style font. I think it turned out well.

As a last surprise for my friend, I decided to try something new with my quilting pattern. I figured out how to draw a meandering lightening bolt, broom, Deathly Hallows symbol, and wand. Using them, I had a repeating pattern throughout the quilt, giving an extra layer of meaning to an already fun quilt. I enjoyed making this quilt, and I learned a lot in the process.