sunday stitch vol. 15 - sittin' on top of the world

It's finished! It's finally finished!

Talk about a labor of love. This, my friends, is Max's baby quilt.

Baby quilt? But doesn't he turn 1 in a few weeks?

Yes. Thanks for pointing that out. 

My sweet baby Max turns 1 in November, and I managed to squeak this baby quilt in while he is still technically a baby. I saw this quilt pattern in the book Let's Sew Together, and fell madly in love. It was the entire reason I bought the book. Thus far I've used the patterns in the book to make this robot and this rag doll, but the world map quilt is my masterpiece.

A few helpful notes on this pattern if you are wanting to undertake this project:

The pattern: Hmmm, what's a nice way to say this? The pattern is not remotely accurate. My husband, the geography minor, nearly threw up when he took a good hard look at it. There were continents and islands represented that don't actually exist. Like, they are not on planet earth anywhere. Minor detail. If you're not about accuracy, then go with it. If you are, you'll need an actual map handy to help you decide what land masses to include. 

Once I blew up and printed the pattern, I taped all the pieces together so I could get a good sense of scale for where to place these islands/continents once I was done with them. It also helped me decide what colors should go where. When it came time to place my islands/continents, I simply laid my quilt top background (the "water") and set the applique pieces right on top. Since my water fabric was solid, I could see through it to place them.

I used a bit of artistic "continental drift" to spread my continents out because - wait for it - the pattern isn't to scale based on the final quilt size. Yep. Right there in the directions it says you have to spread the continents out after you cut them to make them fill up the quilt top. It suggests referencing a world map to help you do this. WOW.

Why on earth they didn't just make the pattern to scale is beyond me. I had a glass of wine after I figured that out.

The fabric: The instructions say that the largest piece of fabric you'll need for the continents is roughly the size of a fat quarter. FALSE. Antarctica is 28" long, so you will need a skinny quarter of fabric for that one. I didn't know this until it was too late, so I had to piece mine together. I spliced it at a skinny point, so it's not super noticeable. Le sigh.

Transferring the pattern pieces: Yeek. This is a big one. Two big issues here. The instructions say to use interfacing on the back of the applique pieces. Interfacing is a material you fuse to the back of your fabric to give it extra stability. Think the inside of your purse or a tote bag. While that would sort of help you here, it's not what you need. What you want is fusible web. This is a 2-sided material that you fuse to your front fabric with an iron, peel off the paper, and then fuse to your back fabric with your iron. It's basically double sided tape for fabric.

Why fusible web instead of interfacing? Some of these islands are so dadgum small that you'll never be able to accurately stitch them to your quilt top without them sliding all over the place. And on the larger continents, you'd likely end up with a lot of shifting (and puckering and yuckiness) in the fabric as you sew. All around, fusible web is the way to go. For more info on the difference between interfacing and fusible web, this post is helpful.

The other issue? The tutorial simply says to trace the continents/islands onto the interfacing, iron onto the backside of the fabric, and sew to the quilt top. The problem? All of your continents WOULD BE FRIGGIN BACKWARDS! This would create mirror images of all of your continents if you did this. NOPE. 

This would only work if you blew up the pattern, cut the pattern out of the paper, then traced it onto the fusible web, then cut it out. I guess you could do that. I wanted to hold onto the pattern to help me place the continents on the quilt top and in case I ever make another one of these (spoiler alert - I won't). Trust me, you think you'll remember after you cut these pieces out where they'll go, but all of the islands basically look the same once they are cut up. You'd make yourself crazy.

Here's what worked for me. I used a light grey sharpie to trace the continent onto the non-paper side (because it's a gel-like surface, a pencil wouldn't work). Then I flipped it over and traced with a pencil onto the paper side. Iron the gummy side onto the wrong side of your fabric. Cut it out. Peel the paper off, and iron it onto the quilt top. Here's a handy GIF to show you how that looks.

OK. That's probably enough complaining about the pattern, because even with all of that frustration, the end result was totally worth it.

Here's sweet Max playing with his quilt top. Yay, now I get to iron it again!

Finished quilt top.

I randomly had 3 different fabrics in my stash with whales on them. I sprinkled them around the quilt top, and also created a Viking ship out of some other scraps. 

The back fabric is pretty much the best thing ever. Once I saw this cute print with little Vikings all over it, I knew it had to be the backing. Unfortunately the Vikings are running side to side (weft) instead of along the length of the bolt (warp). That meant I needed to piece the back of the quilt, lest my Vikings run the wrong direction. 

I used scraps left over from the front of the quilt, along with that bottom right square which is left over from his (hand me down from Henry) crib bedding. That fabric also appears in Henry's baby quilt. I love that the quilts will carry that fabric on long after they are done with baby bedding.

I used the monogramming function on my machine to create a little name plate.

Did you pick up on the fact that the quilting pattern is the longitude and latitude lines of a map? Perfection.

At the end of the day, I'm thrilled with the quilt. It was completely worth the headache and you could never find anything like it for sale. Totally one of a kind. Hope you love it forever, Max, because it shaved about a year off of your momma's life.

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