Star Wars Quilts: Episode 1

A while back I wanted to use up some of my blue fabric from my fabric stash since the drawer was overflowing.  My son had recently asked for a Star Wars quilt, so I decided to take care of both challenges at the same time.

Fast forward to the fall of that year, and I am participating in a rather large craft fair – one of the largest I’d done.  I find out my booth is on the corner, and I panic because I simply can’t have the side of my booth be the backs of the quilts hanging up on the inside.  I needed something to hang on the outside of the booth, but I’d sold a couple of quilts on Etsy that would have done the job.  I ran upstairs and asked my little buddy if I could borrow his Star Wars quilt for the show.  He’s such a good sport and didn’t hesitate to agree.  I placed it on the outside, and the visibility was excellent.

When I placed his quilt up, I expected it to gain some attention, but I wasn’t prepared for how much attention it would garner.  My booth neighbor behind me said that everyone who passed by her booth was talking about the Star Wars quilt.  I had several people ask about what it would cost to make one for them since I had a “Not for Sale” tag on my son’s.  I joked that if he wasn’t in charge of my end-of-life decisions I could have sold that quilt three times that day.  So it seemed a no-brainer that I would make one to sell after that show.

It didn’t hurt that I still had a lot of blue fabric left over from previous projects, gifted to me, or rescued from remnant bins.  The first thing I did was to get out all the blue fabric I intended on using and placed it in the order I wanted.

After that, I cut them all into 3.5″ strips.

From there, I sewed the strips end-to-end and rolled them up on an empty tissue holder.  The final radius of that roll was 4.25″.

There’s not much new in the quilting world in regards to techniques, but I *might* be the first person I know of to use what I call the “chair technique”.  I had my husband video the beginning of the process.

From here, I sewed together the strips into pairs so as to make organizing easier.

It was here I realized I had much more than the original twin-size quilt goal.  In fact, I had exactly enough strips cut to make TWO twin-sized quilts. I laid everything out and then picked up every other strip segment; this helped in that my strips were still going in order from lightest to darkest, allowing the silhouettes to be mostly in the lighter fabric.

I decided that I would make one with the original Luke and Darth Vader silhouettes like I had for my son, but the second one would be linked to the newest film and feature Rey and Kylo Ren.

Stayed tuned tomorrow for Episode 2.

Related posts and blogs:

Katy Quilts: Finish it Up Thursday

Aby Quilts: Star Wars Quilt Finished!

Legacy of a Last Jedi