Adding To The Transportation Quilt

 After I made all the designs for a construction quilt, I thought that the six shapes were insufficient.  I found this pattern on Etsy,

so I looked there for more shapes. 

I changed the sizes and did some minor tweaks to suit me

There were other patterns on Etsy that I liked, but they included things like covered wagons and bicycles. I didn't want to do that.  

It was important to match the simplistic style of the previous patterns. The biggest obstacle to adding designs is my absolute inability to draw any recognizable shape.  My stick figures are pretty sad, too. 

I wanted to add a school bus, train and fire engine.  These are all things that Wesley finds fascinating. 

I found some simple designs on my Cricut Design Space. I also Googled some cartoon images. These are the ones I used to make a ladder truck/fire engine.

I cut out the shapes from Cricut and then played with the shapes until I was happy with the finished shapes.

Once again I traced the designs on a sheet of Steam A Seam.  I roughly cut out the shapes and ironed them onto the back side of the chosen fabric.  Then I cut out the shapes and assembled them to finish the design.  

Along the way I made small artistic changes. And when I say artistic, I do not in any way claim to be an artist.  I don't even identify as an artist.  But I do seem to be able to play around with someone else's design to suit my ideas. But you can decide how successful I am.

The train is a bit smaller than the other designs and less cartoon like.But I wanted to get the second car included.  After all, is an engine alone a train??  It may not match the feeling of the other designs, but I'm happy with it.

Now, my problem is that I think I may want to add some more designs. After all, our grandson, Wesley, really likes garbage trucks.  He also loves airplanes and helicopters.  I'm not sure when this madness will end. 

Transportation Quilt

Our 18 month old grandson loves trucks and other large construction equipment.  Is it because he is a boy, or are we unconsciously leading him in that direction?  Who knows?  But he loves all large vehicles

I looked online to find a pattern to make him a quilt. I found a few good ones on Etsy. I started making projects using Steam A Seam to appliqué shapes on fabric as part of the design. I used it extensively for the horse quilt I wrote about previously. This pattern uses a lot of appliqué. 

The one I bought had six different designs. But they were two different sizes. Three of each size. I didn't want to do that. I discovered that if I used my copier and reduced the larger designs (the three on the left) to 75%, they would be similar sizes.

I made some minor changes. Then I traced the patterns on the Steam a Seam, cut out roughly around the tracing and then ironed onto the back of the chosen fabric.  Using the pictures, I assembled the vehicle and ironed them in place. 

After I made the six designs, I laid them out to see how the quilt would look.  Now I think I need to make it a bit bigger. 

I need to decide which three vehicles to add.  My current plan is a train, a fire engine and a yellow school bus, because the wheels go round and round. 

Thread!

 One of the difficult things when quilting is finding just the right thread to go with the fabric.  I have bought many spools and many different boxes to store them.  Unfortunately, they aren't all in one place and I spend time trying to find one that matches.  

Sometimes I buy a duplicate because I didn't see that I already had the perfect color.  But really there are so many different shades of yellow, and I have a bunch of them, but the next project with yellow fabric will be a different shade from all my current yellow threads.

I recently bought three thread spool holders.  Each one holds 60 spools, so I had room for 180 spools.  I thought I was way over buying. I tried to set out all the thread and organize them by color and shade.  Then I placed them on the pegs.  I kept finding colors that should have been placed 10 pegs ago.  At first I took them all down and added the thread in. Then I just gave up.

I really should have left a few spaces between each color group, but I was worried I would run out of spaces. I did end up with a few empty pegs, but not enough that I can go back and leave spaces throughout the holders. I think I'll buy one more holder and then reorganize so that I have room to add in the new thread I will inevitably have to buy to match the fabric on my next project.