I'd Give Eraserhead

The Son

The Son-In-Law

The Holy Hand Grenade

oh

my

god

Luckily I am the stubbornest human alive, ‘cause I never woulda finished otherwise. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know the terms to look up how to do anything, I musta reinvented the wheel like eight times and it took ten months, BUT I DID IT.

Figured I’d suffered enough and would never do it again and now I’m on quilt #9 smdh

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I’m hyperventilating.

Holy shit. Holy SHIT.

This is INCREDIBLE.

Oh my god.

I’ve gotta go lay down holy shit look at this how do we just walk by other human beings every day and live our separate lives when there’s a person sitting next to you on the train or in line for coffee who goes home and makes things like this what even IS being human holy shit.

Okay so on a purely technical level, this is not that difficult, you just gotta come at it a little sideways.

The background of this sucker is just rows of 1.5″-wide fabric strips. I can’t remember the exact pattern, but I wanna say it was something like one row 6″ strips, one row 4.5″ strips, one row alternating? I don’t remember exactly, it was a while ago. That’s not difficult, you just lay it out and sew it all together one row at a time. It’s not hard, just tedious.

The fish are a lil different. I can’t draw, there is a disconnect somewhere and my hands are stupid, so I figured out probably fifteen years ago that tracing was the way to go. For this, I legit just yanked several photos of fancy-looking goldfish off the internet and traced over ‘em in Photoshop.

Once I had enough, I printed my outlines, laid ‘em out on the background to create the idea of movement, and then traced the outlines out on fabric and pinned the hell out of ‘em.

This woulda been WAY easier with Heat ‘N Bond, but I didn’t know that was a thing at the time. From there I just used just about every fancy stitch on my inherited sewing machine to make the fish STAY WHERE I PUT THEM, and also look good.

I have since learned this is called “raw edge applique” but whatever. It’s fun, it’s neat, you can do it with a bunch of stuff and impress the hell outta people. More recently, it’s how I’ve gone from this:

to this:

(this was another project I SUFFERED over unnecessarily, because I’m the dip that decided to quilt the waves, like a moron)

The back is plushy as hell and looks like this:

EVEN MORE GORGEOUS AND LOVELY IN PERSON.

AND IT’S WASHABLE 

awheckery is too modest to mention it, but the quilt is loaded up with real specific meaning – I’m Chinese-American, and there are eight goldfish on the quilt and a ninth on an accompanying pillow.  Nine is a homophone in Chinese for “always”, “gold” is a metonym for wealth and prosperity, and “fish” is a homophone for the word for abundance, so putting nine goldfish on something for a new baby is a lovely Chinese way to wish them good luck and abundant prosperity in life.  

And the pillow shown above is symbolic, too!  You’ll notice that the two ships up top.  My family is ethnically Han Chinese from Hong Kong, so  awheckery put a distinctive Chinese ship up there, and my husband is Norwegian, so that’s a Norwegian schooner.  And then the three whales underneath are me, the husband, and our wee little whale.  

Please note that I did not know ANY OF THIS WAS COMING.  They just FIGURED THIS OUT ON THEIR OWN and by polling friends in our shared fandom, and one day the quilt with the blanket showed up at my house, and I  screamed so loud that my husband came running.  And then we got the pillows a little bit later, and I may have screamed again.   awheckery is one of the most talented humans I have ever had the pleasure of knowing or meeting.  

I’ve told OP that if my house is ever on fire, I’m grabbing the kid and the quilt in that order.  The husband can go find our wedding photos.