Truck Quilt

Like many things I do, I started this at least a month ago, but I'm finally done with part of it!

I was looking into making sheets for Aidan's bed, because I like having a flat sheet for him on top of his fitted one, but it needs to be at least half fitted because he'll pull it off if it's not. Anyhow, I was looking up patterns and came across this technique for making quilts, particularly crib/toddler size ones.

Here's the finished product:

The idea is if you take three different colored sheets of fabric the same size and fold and cut them a certain way, you have three quilt faces out of the same fabrics by rearranging the pieces. It's quick and pretty easy!!

I ruffled through the material we have in our collection and found a few similarly textured pieces that went together:

That's after cutting the pieces as directed in the pattern above.
I wanted the finished quilts to be 56 by 42 inches, so I decided to make the corner squares 9x9. The idea is to have your side panels be rectangles with the same length as your corner square lengths.

To achieve this, I first cut the fabrics each into 42x56 rectangles. Then I folded them first to divide the 56 inches in half and then that was folded to divide the 42 inch sides in half. From there, I cut the width and length each 9 inches from the edges (see link for better description) and separated the pieces into the piles seen above.

I rearranged them into suitable combinations for the three quilts. From there I sewed the pieces together first in vertical sections (the top, middle, and bottom strips were created by adjoining the sides to the center pieces) and then I sewed these three together on the bottom and top of the large middle section (again, better description in the pattern).

Then, I got distracted and let them sit for a month. The plan was to make patterns for the adornments on the quilts out of cardstock on the Cricut machine. So, when I finally picked this back up on Friday, that's what I did.

The large truck required the Cricut Expression's 12x24 inch mat and some giant cardstock. Otherwise, the smaller trucks were done on 8.5x11 cardstock. I made them as big as I could by using the "Set Paper Size" feature to let the machine know how much material there was to work with, then I used the "Fit to Page" button to let it decide how big it could make the trucks.

I used the Everyday Paper Dolls cartridge to cut out the truck shapes.

Looks pretty good with paper, now to cut out the patterns on the fabric. I used yellow because it was the closest matching in texture and hue that we had, if I had bought fabric for this I probably would have chosen something different. Still, looks decent to me.

I used a dot glue runner to attach the cardstock to the fabric. It made cutting things out a lot easier. I tried using pins and that failed pretty quickly.

I used a pencil to trace the details on the truck.

Cutting out the windows and tires wasn't so easy, but since it's hand made I feel like a little messiness adds to the rustic value. Maybe...? Works for me.

I've heard there is a possibility to be able to cut the fabric straight on the Cricut. I'll have to do more research and figure this out, because that would have made this a lot simpler.

Here are the three trucks, all cut out.

Now, I started pinning the trucks on to sew. I did them one at a time, when you're sewing them and turning the fabric a lot you'll have to move it back and forth through the sewing machine; pins in all that extra fabric is a bad idea.

Here's the first one, sewed on. I decided to sew the details as well, I was thinking of using fabric paint to draw them on permanently but wanted to finish this without a trip to the store. I like how it turned out.

The big truck.

Here's the machine I'm using. It's programed by that old school GameBoy Pocket. Remember those? Yeah. But, it's still way more high tech than anything else we have to sew with and it does some pretty awesome stuff. Like zig-zag stitch, and it lets me adjust the length and width of said zig-zags.

Next, a dump truck.

 Then I attached the backing. I used the same sheet of yellow, luckily it was big enough to complete the project. I decided not to use batting on this quilt because 1. I didn't have any and 2. I thought it would be nice for summer to have a cover for Aidan's bed that wasn't too warm.

 I attached the front/back wrong-side-out to sew them together.

 I sewed everywhere but this last half of the corner block here. I triple stitched the edge of the opening to make it strong enough to work through, and then began to cut the extra fabric off the sides. Not totally necessary, but it makes the finished product here look a lot nicer I think.

Then I turned the work right-side out through that not-yet-sewn corner. I used the tip of the scissors to gently poke out the edges.

I ironed during all of these steps before cutting any fabric, you should do this to make sure things aren't out of sorts later. For the backing, I ironed again to get the edges lined up straight and then pinned through the front and back along the borders of each block/rectangle. This was to make sure the fabric was lined up right so I could sew along these borders to keep the back from twisting around later.

 Don't forget to sew up your inside-out edge.

 A clearer view of the pinning/stitching lines:

 With this, the project is finished.

 Fits pretty nicely in the crib/on the toddler mattress.

Now, I'll have to make him a set of sheets and pillow case to match. We'll see about that, I get distracted a lot.