CREATE A CHILD-INSPIRED QUILT

Image Gallery

Is your child's artwork burgeoning from the cracks of the kitchen drawers? Has your young artist's creativity covered all the empty spaces on your walls? If so, why not let some of the drawings inspire a little creative needlework of your own?

Dancing balloons, imaginary unicorns, and brightly colored rainbows seem to flow almost continually from a child's mind onto paper, and—by using appliqué and embroidery—you can capture some of your youngster's creations in a beautiful quilt. (What better gift-of-a-lifetime could you put on a child's bed than a warm, personalized coverlet decorated with the little one's own fantasies?)

SELECT THE SCENES

The first step in this project is to take all your child's pictures and sort through them. Each youngster usually has some special images that appear again and again in his or her drawings, and it's likely that you'll find a number of these that are the right size to transfer onto a cloth square (you'll have a "working area" of about 14" X 14" for each picture) just as they are. In the quilt shown here, the fat fairy, the snaky snail, and the butterfly were copied straight from drawings ... while the swimming mermaid and merman, the turtle, and the flying chick were enlarged a bit.

Once you've selected the sketches you'll use, divide them into those that are suitable for embroidery and those that lend themselves to appliqué. I found, for example, that the rainbow shown in the photograph had too many colors to appliqué successfully, while the turtle and the unicorn required just a few solid-color areas and thus were perfect for "cut out and sew on" art. (Actually, you'll find that most drawings seem to demand a combination of both crafts, with the embroidery most often used to add fine details . .. such as the fairy's wand, the owl's eyes, or the balloon's strings.)

To make a quilt large enough for a standard single bed, you'll need twelve 15" squares cut from preshrunk or prewashed muslin.

Then simply use tailor's chalk to draw the outlines of your chosen images on scraps of appropriately colored fabric. Be sure that—when you cut out the appliqué pieces—you leave enough material to turn the edges under before sewing the pattern in place. (You can either embroider around the edges or stitch them down with your machine.)