My 80s/Back to the Future Quilt

Finally, photos!

Here's a bit of the 80s quilt with the first of the shadow/silhouette beings added:

You can see, in relation to the sewing machine, more or less how big they are. I made them by fusing a large square of Heat 'n' Bond Lite to the back of some solid black fabric, then freehand drawing them onto the paper backing and using some paper scissors to cut them out. I peeled off the paper backing and fused them to this part of my 80s quilt. (See what I mean about the colors? Those are prime 80s colors, I think. Ugh.)

 

There's a closer view of my little demon, the squat woman with the Marge Simpson hair, and my little girl. In this photo, the woman and little girl are stitched down but the demon is not. (I have to stitch them down otherwise they'd start to come off over time. The stitching should keep them down longer.) Next step is to sandwich and quilt it and then attach it to the rest of the quilt as the parts are done.

Here is some more appliqué the works:

I cut these little creatures (some of which were inspired by the drawings in Lynda Barry's last book Making Comics--the first trio were right out of The Brain's bank of images) out of the same square of black fabric as the first trio. I have yet to fuse them down or sew them; I was just auditioning their placement on other parts of the quilt.

These two may be my favorite pair so far.

But you can see what I mean about the 80s colors, right? Not to mention my early improvisational sewing. (I've never actually sewn a quilt according to a pattern. I make it up as I go along, always.) In this case, I really was just cutting and sewing with no destination in mind except to keep cutting and sewing until I had a roughly bed-sized quilt top finished. (This quilt top would just barely cover the top of a small twin bed--lol--but it was the first bed-sized quilt top that I put together, and I only managed that, funnily enough, because I didn't care about the fabric at all.)

The kicker is that I don't quilt the entire quilt top at once anymore, I quilt in sections, so after letting this quilt top age for a couple of years (!) I took scissors to it and cut it up as the next step to finishing it.

That is only three sections of perhaps eight or ten. And they're not remotely finished. Like I said, they still need to be ironed and then stitched down, sandwiched with batting and backing, quilted, and then sashed together with the rest of the pieces of the quilt. It'll be weeks before I finish it. (It kinds of reminds me of a film director who I read was asked about his recent terribly reviewed move and said something along the lines of, it sucks, yes, but it takes almost as much work to make a bad film as it does to make a good one.)

And speaking of it sucking, Dave and I were going to see the latest Star Wars movie last night but opted to go to dinner with Chris and Grace instead. (We were going to go after, but I hadn't gotten enough sleep to feel like I could make it through dinner and a movie.) It's getting mixed reviews, but Chris and Grace gave it good reviews. We'll see it anyway because it's a Star Wars move and the only of those that we've skipped are two of the three that followed the original trio. (We made the mistake of seeing The Phantom Menace and then wisely skipped Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. I mean. After Phantom Menace, I realized that George Lucas had enough of my money.)

Tonight's plan is for dinner that consists of cheese (courtesy of Kelly and Kevin), bread, and salad. Then maybe a trip to Target for, you know, stuff.