Panda Quilt - In A Tickle

My granddaughter who regularly paints with me loves pandas. Some of her early painting experiences were painting pandas. You can see those paintings from when she was seven years old here. Now she’s twelve and her opportunities to paint are expanding even more. She has her own studio appropriately named Black Panda Art Studio.

She had hinted several times she would really like to have a panda comforter, bedspread, blanket- something! Since we could not find anything ready made, I started looking for quilt patterns. I found a cute pieced panda wall hanging from The Jolly Jabber. After downloading the free pattern, I made the panel to see how well I liked it and decided it was a winner.

After making six panels, that seemed enough for the main part of the quilt. I took the panels to my friend who owns a quilting machine for her advice on about how to put the quilt together. I thought I would probably be putting strips between the panels in another color fabric. She has a large piece of flannel on one wall that she uses to “lay out” possible quilt designs- the cotton fabric pieces stick to the flannel without having to pin in place. Everything looks very different looking at the design straight on the wall rather than at an angle laying the pieces on the floor. After playing around with several ideas, I decided the panels looked best all connected together.

The next step was trying to figure out what other fabrics to put around the center pandas. For this step, I took the picture of one panel and imported the image into my designer software. Here I could play around with colors and sizes of strips until I had the design just they way I wanted. The software also helped me know the sizes of fabric strips I would need to cut. This is the design I settled on with her favorite colors:

Sewing lots of long straight pieces together seems like it will never end! Finally it was ready to be quilted. My grandmothers and great-grandmothers made many quilts in their lifetimes (several of which I own and cherish). Some were pieced on sewing machines and some were pieced by hand, but all of them were quilted completely by hand. I remember visiting one great-grandma and her dining-room was set up with a quilting frame. Other ladies would come over to help her and they had a quilting bee. They didn’t have social media, but lots of social “news” was shared at those quilting bees!

I’d love to be able to quilt it all by hand, but I don’t have the room, the frame, or the time to do it. I wanted to give it to my granddaughter before she had kids of her own! Up to this point she knew nothing about the quilt. So I took she and her big sister on a field trip to my friend’s house to learn how quilts are made. She was in shock when she found out what we would be quilting. The girls got to help set up the backing, batting and quilt on the quilting machine frame…

…and then operate the machine by hand to baste along the edges.

Although the machine can be operated completely by hand to do the quilting in any design desired, we let the computer do it automatically with the design we picked out. It is an amazing process to watch! The machine can only stitch a few rows though before the fabric has to be rolled to allow it to stitch the next section- so it’s not completely automated. However, the computer knows exactly where to continue stitching!

When the quilt was quilted and trimmed, the next step was to sew on the strip of binding, which I did on my sewing machine. Then I turned the binding and hand sewed it to the back of the quilt all the way around. Finally, it was completed, washed and dried.

My granddaughter was so excited to put it on her bed! After she got everything set up, I heard her say, “Now I will want to make my bed everyday!” I asked her a few days later if she had been making her bed everyday. She sheepishly grinned and said no- but it was because she loves to cuddle up with the quilt, and not just on her bed!