Monday, December 3, 2018

Dorito-ish ++ My Son's Quilt

I would love to show you my son's entry for the Youth category for QuiltCon 2019.  He is 11 years old, in 6th grade, and has a very strong sense of his design style (which is very different than mine :)

When he first came to me with his quilt design and I was a little confused, why were these big orange triangles floating on a rainbow?  What were they?  He quickly explained that they were Doritos chips on a rainbow striped background.

I understood the rainbow part to the design, as he has loved all colors and rainbows since he was a toddler (you can see here the wall hanging I made for his room), but the Doritos were a surprise.  He does not even like Doritos!  He told me that they were just "cool" and that is all the explanation I got.



My son wanted the strips to be sewn onto a white background quilt top but did not want raw edges showing so he used the same technique I did for Warp and Weft.  After the strips were cut, sewn, pressed, and fusable added to the back, they sat for 3-4 months.

After my reminding nagging, he finally got to work to finish the quilt.  He sewed the stripes onto a quilt sandwich (so sewing the strips on also served as the quilting for the quilt) with only a single line of stitching as he wanted the edges to ripple and flutter.

Next came the Doritos chips. He sewed them like a pillow, sewing all three sides and then flipping the shape right side out using a little cut in the back.  My son did not want any quilting on them as he wanted them to be as poofy as possible so he just stitched down the sides by hand.


The most tricky part of the quilt was squaring it up and I did help with this part.  Squaring up a whole quilt style quilt is tricky and can be very frustrating.  We eventually got it to a somewhat square / rectangle shape.

He chose a striped binding which I think works well with the rainbow colors.  The quilt was finished, photographed, and entered into QuiltCon 2019 over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Hopefully it will get into the Youth category and I can bring home a picture of the quilt hanging in Nashville.





16 comments:

  1. How fun is this?! I love his design aesthetic. Simple shapes. Pure colors. It's a surprise that he doesn't like Doritos! Maybe he'd like them crumbled on top of a Mexican-style casserole? Well, Frito-Lay would love this quilt, for sure! I hope it's chosen for the youth category. Then, I'll look forward to seeing it in Nashville!

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  2. Gotta get them interested while young! It is awesome that he came to you with the design already in his head. I love that my 7 yr old GS loves to come sew with GMA!

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  3. You can never understand a childs creative mind at any age! What a fun quilt and my fingers are crossed it makes the cut too! I admire the fact that you let him dictate the design...it would have taken every ounce of restraint from me not to take over!!

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  4. The Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Cheryl! You’ve passed along your creative gene!

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  5. I am so glad that he was able to get the quilt finished and submitted! I hope I get to see it in Nashville in person!

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  6. This is amazing - no, really! I love it. Very modern. He definitely needs to keep it up.

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  7. I love that your son put so much thought into his quilt. It is a wonderful quilt. I hope he wins. Good luck to him. Hugs,

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  8. Good job Cheryl. It is so hard to let them do things exactly as they want - even when the aesthetics are so different from our own. Doritos are cool and I agree with him - I don't like them either. Haha - The poofy triangles look great and I love the rainbow stripes. Please tell him he did great!

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  9. Wow, I love the way his mind works!! This is a great quilt and I hope it is accepted at QuiltCon!! His mind kinda works like mine in the changing of the distances between his rainbow stripes...I do quilts like that too!! By not quilting the Doritos, he is allowing the nature of the chip to come through...they aren't all flat and do have some great texture to them.

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  10. Doritos and rainbows - who knew? He did obviously; really so clever.

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  11. I love that he has his own design sense! And yay for you for facilitating his work. I hope to see it at QC too!

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  12. The unevenly spaced stripes are the perfect backdrop for the chips! I do hope to see his quilt at QuiltCon!

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  13. This is so much fun! I don't like Doritos in food form, either, but it turns out that I love them in fabric form! The rainbow stripes sewn in 3 dimensional form is super cool. Good luck to him!

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  14. Fingers crossed that his entry gets accepted. It's a very fun quilt and I love the story that goes with it.

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  15. That is so cool! And he definitely has his own sense of design and what he wants. Good luck to him!

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Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment!