Project: TARDIS Baby Quilt

So, I know that of late Scrimpalicious has been much more heavily focused on cooking, food politics, environmentalism, and natural health than it has been on around-the-house stuff and crafts, but I just had to share. It's not every day that one of your best friends has a baby, and it's not every day that your best friend who just had a baby is also super into Doctor Who (and so are her kids). It's also not every day that two other friends offer to help pay for the fabric for you to make a totally awesome TARDIS quilt for your friend's new baby.

Well, the stars aligned and everything came together just right and just in time for me to make this awesome thing for my dear friend Stacie of Red Hog Farm.

TARDIS baby quilt? Oh yes.

I'm not going to get real crazy with the details of design and all that. I did some googling of various images of the TARDIS, I blocked it all out square by square in an excel spreadsheet and on graph paper, I did a bunch of math, and I dropped a bunch of dollars on this gorgeous purple batik that looks like the time vortex:

You can't see it here but because I quilted around the TARDIS in front, the back of the quilt has the almost-invisible afterimage of the dematerializing/dematerialized TARDIS

I improvised pretty hard on the border of the quilt. Wasn't positive exactly how it would turn out so I just started sewing until I got something that was about the right size and then centered it, sewed it on, and mitered the corners and let the chips (or quilt squares) fall where they would. I figured that since it was a semi-patchworky thing it would probably work out alright, and it did!

Diagonal striped border with mitered corners

The black fabric for the Police Public Call Box sign and the yellow in the windows was chosen specifically because I thought it was kind of reminiscent of the swirls of paint in Van Gogh paintings, which is of course also a Doctor Who reference.

Paint swirls! But also lit-up window panes!

The signs were done two ways. The white on black is actually iron-on lettering which I cut out one at a time and then lined up with a ruler and ironed on (painstakingly). The black on white was white fabric that I ran through my printer, soaked and ironed to set the ink, and then sewed in as an applique.

Note black fabric's swirls and the unfortunate little leftover bits of clear iron-on transfer.

The whole thing is quilted with low-loft organic cotton batting. I did a combination of hand-basting and safety pinning (I had some concerned about the thickness of my safety pins in some spots), then stitched over all of the seams ("stitch in the ditch") where the TARDIS was pieced together. 

It took me the entire Titanic episode to get this thing put together and ready for quilting

The very outermost border is made from the folded-over backing of the quilt. I originally bought dark blue binding to use but upon experimenting liked the look of the purple batik far, far more. 

I couldn't be happier with how this turned out. Hooray!

I'm not going to list the total fabric cost here because it was a gift. Time spent, including planning and shopping and being grumpy over mistakes and doing things over because I got it wrong the first time was probably about 50-60 hours. I think I could probably make another one in about 20, if I could muster the energy. Maybe when I'm not so busy with other things?

I have already had four requests from other people to make one for them. We shall see.