Saturn – Charlotte’s Quilt

Back in October, I worked with both of my kids to make entries for the Youth category at QuiltCon 2023. They both made quilts last year, so this was our second collaboration! Today I’m sharing Charlotte’s quilt, and I’ll be back with Emma’s later this week.

(Believe it or not, I somehow neglected to take a photo of either girl with their finished quilt before shipping them off to the show — total Quilt Mom Fail!! I’ll have to update these posts in March once we have their quilts back from Atlanta.)

Charlotte wanted to make Saturn, and choose several yellow fabrics from my stash. She particularly loved the fabric in the middle, which is woven with glittery metallic threads!

We started by sewing strips together. At 7 years old, she is capable of doing quite a bit, but is not entirely trustworthy around my sewing machine, so we worked together — I fed the fabric under the needle, Charlotte ran the pedal and cut the threads at the end of each seam, and I pressed each seam.

Once we had our striped background together, Charlotte drew a large circle on the paper side of some Steam-a-Seam. I fused that to the back of her yellow stripes, and she cut out the circle.

We then used the same technique to cut out Saturn’s rings, and talked about how the tails needed to be long enough to tuck under the circle fabric. Once we had the rings cut out and positioned in a way that she liked, I fused both pieces to her chosen background fabric and stitched around the raw edges to secure the fabric.

From there it was time to quilt! I loaded it onto my longarm and let her drive the machine. She quilted a series of looping lines across the quilt top in gold thread. Her quilting turned out great! You can see a video of Charlotte in action on my Instagram feed:

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After she completed the quilting, I finished up the quilt by hand stitching the binding and adding a hanging sleeve and label.

She named her quilt “Saturn” and her artist statement for the QuiltCon entry was:

This is Saturn, and Saturn is my favorite planet and it is in space. My favorite part of how I made Saturn was making the different fabrics for the center and also the rings. I liked to quilt it with my mom.

I can’t wait to see Charlotte’s quilt hanging at QuiltCon!

The stats:

• Quilt measures 22″ x 23″.
• Saturn fabrics are a mix of prints from my stash. Background is Speckled by Ruby Star Society.
• Backing is a royal blue print with white stars from my stash.
• Binding is Speckled by Ruby Star Society.
• Longarm quilted by Charlotte on my Handiquilter Avante with shiny gold polyester thread.