Miles “Tails” Prower
74″ x 94″
made 2008, photographed July 2011

Once upon a time, I made a quilt for my son.  The coolest part about this quilt is that he designed it himself. He was 10* at the time.

With a tiny bit of help from me, my kiddo created this chart using an image he loved of his favorite video game character.  The main part of the quilt, excluding the solid pieces of fabric at the top and bottom, is made of 1,054 individual 2″ squares.

I pieced almost all of the mosaic while at retreat with my bee in 2008 on my Singer 301A. I remember chain piecing from different colored stacks of 2 1/2″ squares that I had cut beforehand. I pieced and pieced…and pieced, all along following the chart and keeping track of everything with Post-It notes!

Much of the following is taken from a post I made over on Fandom Quilts back in June 2008, after I’d completed quilting and binding the quilt.

The blue sparkle background fabric was cut in 2 1/2″ strips (except the top and bottom, which were wider), with the other colors all being 2 1/2″ squares (2″ finished). I quilted 2″ squares to give the illusion that the entire quilt was made from squares. You can still see the chalk lines from the grid I drew on the solid fabric.

The entire quilt was quilted on my home sewing machine using a walking foot and straight-line quilting.

Hanging from the side of our trampoline (photo taken in 2008) just for SCALE. You can see the quilting better in here. I think you can also tell that there are two colors of orange, and the subtle difference between the white and off-white. We gave this trampoline away earlier this year, 2011.

This awesome swirly red fabric was chosen by the kiddo for the back.

For quilting, I outlined the major shapes (the white quilting in the pic is one of the hands). When there were more than two or three blocks of the same color, I quilted around to echo the outside shape.

Grid quilting the top and bottom of the quilt created the illusion of 2″ squares on the solid top and bottom pieces of the quilt top.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this post and you like what you see, visit The Quilting Gallery’s Quilts for Little Boys contest and vote! There are lots of great quilts there to see, including “Tails!”