Kelly's Doctor Who Quilt

My friend Kelly, who I met through our mutual love of Star Trek Next Generation, is going through a tough time in her life.  She is the main caregiver of her father who has Alzheimer's,  So I thought I would try to put a smile on her face and make her a Doctor Who quilt.  Kelly and I share a slight obsession about Xena, Star Trek Next Generation, and Doctor Who.  It is my opinion that Kelly is a little more obsessive about her TV watching than I am because she built a website about Xena and she even writes a blog on her TV obsessions called "Thoughts from a TV Geek".  I'm not going to mention I may have been the bigger STNG nerd since I did write a few fan fiction stories.

Wait I got a little off track, back to the Doctor Who quilt.  My friend Mary made a Doctor Who quilt for her grandson who's probably about 10 or 12.  My daughter does accuse me of having the TV IQ of a middle schooler.  Anyway, Mary had some leftover fabric and gave it to me.  Score.!!!! Turns out the fabric she gave me was 5.5" width of fabric strips so they were easy to cut up in to approximately charm pack size.  I was on the hunt for a cool charm pack quilt and found this one from Leisure Arts.  I decided it was simple enough I could figure out how to make it without a pattern.

I used EQ7 to draw it out and figure out the yardage I would need for the background material.  Such a wonderful tool.

The design I put together needed some dark background fabric which I found at Joann's and I was off to the races.  I cut the 5.5" squares from the Doctor Who fabric using my handy dandy 5.5" fussy cut square from Fons and Porter.  I ended up with 64 squares which was perfect for my design.

Then I cut the black background and white stripe cutting them to the appropriate lengths.  However, I should have just strip pieced 1 white and two blacks together then cut them in the appropriate lengths.  Even without the strip piecing putting the quilt together was pretty easy.

Once the top was assembled I wanted to design a really cool quilt motif in 5D Quilt Design Creator.  This is the software I use with my Viking Platinum 3000 and the Quilt Sew Clever robot.  I love the robot because it allows me to do designs I would never be able to do freehand.  I thought it would be fun to have the names of all the companions since the reboot in 2005 and a few T.A.R.D.I.S in the panograph I designed.  It took me 2 or 3 hours to get that done but it was pretty fun.

I grabbed some of my gray backing fabric and warm and natural batting and threw them on long arm machine.  After my problem with the robot on my last quilt, I was a little apprehensive about this pattern running correctly, but it ran flawlessly.  Yeehaw!!!!!!!!

It quilted up quickly and I giggled each time I saw the T.A,R,D.I.S. stitch out.


 I was pretty happy with the end result

Fun, fun, fun.  I hope Kelly likes it and gets a ton of use out of it but regardless, I had fun putting it together.