William's Neighborhood

 Another quilt for my friend Mari's ever-expanding family of nieces and nephews!

The requirement for this one was: "a theme of Space with colorful planets, moon, stars ,etc. For the background - navy or grey, but not black."

Hmmmm.....two outer space quilts in a row!?!?!?!? (To Infinity and Beyond was my prior quilt). Suddenly they are very popular! I turned to my buddy Mr. Google to see what was out there. 

Found that "space" quilts generally fall into two groups: rockets / aliens, and planets. The first group did not really meet the specs, and were primarily applique (nope). The second mostly featured really large (like queen or bigger) quilts! Well....yeah...trying to represent the solar system in a meaningful way on a small quilt would be tough.

But then I found one that pretty much fit the bill. It was a pattern on Amazon that was actually a Kindle download! It was pretty hard to read, and had templates, so I figured I would just print it. That was when I discovered that Kindle has no printing capability. This is on the device itself, your phone, or a PC! I guess it makes sense; that's the whole point of the Kindle - to save paper - but still!

So, I used the download as a guide and developed my own pattern. The idea was to have 8 planets (sorry Pluto!!) in somewhat relative sizes and in representational colors. Now before anyone gets to astro-precise: yes.....I know the sizes are nowhere near correct relatively (nor the space between them), or this quilt would be several city blocks long. But I did the best I could.

For the most part, I took the same approach as I used for Circular Spectrum #72. I cut out the appropriate sized circle (with seam allowance), added a layer of interfacing, sewed around the edge and flipped it inside out. For each, I then put one or two pieces of batting behind it and edge-stitched it in the appropriate place on the background fabric (a perfect blend of blurry star clusters on a gray field).  

First, little Mercury:

There he is.....cratered and baked from the Sun.

Next Venus, Earth and the Moon:

Venus is a mystery, shrouded in carbon dioxide. It is nearly the same size as Earth.

Earth is that lovely blue and green gem, with a nice polar ice cap at the top. Aaaahhhh....looks so peaceful and inhabitable. 

The Moon looks on, with its many craters. 

Then Mars, the Red Planet, the Bringer of War.

 Mars is roughly half the size of Earth and twice the size of the Moon.

Next we get into the big guys in our Solar System!

Jupiter......the largest planet, the Bringer of Jollity.

A gas giant with a multi-colored surface, most notably known for the Great Red Spot. This storm has existed for (at least) hundreds of years, and is bigger than the diameter of the Earth (although in recent years it has shrunk in size).  Mine was attached with fusible webbing. 

 

Then, Saturn!!!!!  With its amazing rings:

This one was extra fun to do! First, Saturn has all kinds of colors in its atmosphere. So another swirly, mixed color fab seemed appropriate.  I edge-stitched that, except I left two openings on the sides so that I could slip the back edge of the ring underneath.

Then, the rings: Saturn has 7 major sets of rings, and 100s of other ringlets! Clearly, I could not even try to do those (well...not with my skill set). So I decided on one silver-sparkly ring. For this, I cut out the shape (the back of the ring actually goes behind / under the planet), and used iron-on interfacing, then another layer of interfacing on the back of that. This gave it some body and allowed me to raw-edge edge-stitch it in place. I then finished the stitching of the planet to lock in the back ring edges. 

Finally: Uranus and Neptune.

Uranus's atmosphere contains methane, which is what gives it its distinctive blue color.

Neptune's atmosphere also contains methane, and sometimes appears blue-green, but I wanted to distinguish it from Uranus, so I chose a mottled fabric. 

The quilting is a swirling free-form stitch, representing all the comets, meteors, dust, and pieces of ice that whiz through our corner of the Universe.

Here is the whole neighborhood together. The gang, in order, roughly makes an "s" shape:

 

You may notice that I did not yet mention the Sun. That is because I took a unique approach with it. Since it is only a quarter circle (you know....it is really BIG!), I decided to wait until the quilt was all quilted and the binding was on before I sewed it on.  This way I was able to align it exactly next to the binding on the two corner edges. I did the same fabric-interface-sew-flip-and-fold technique, but I also added 4 layers of batting! Each was cut in the same quarter-circle shape, but stepped down in size. 

The back of the quilt has all of these planets, plus comets, stars, and a smattering of spaceships (some of which may not be from Earth!):

I hope you have fun exploring your neighborhood William!