Eagle Quilt Tutorial

 As per requested, here is how I made the Eagle Quilts. First, I found pictures on-line of the badge, enlarged it so the center circle was 8" in diameter and printed it on regular printer paper. I wrote notes on the front of that sheet about colors I needed for that patch.

Then, using a light table, I traced the picture on the back so that I would have a reverse image. Yes, I know one can print it in reverse, but I chose to do it this way because when I made the patch, I wanted to use the "original" to help me place the pieces in exactly the right place. As you can see (above) on the back I also labeled what color each area would need to be.

For some, I couldn't find the patch on-line. I guess I could have used a table scanner and got a copy that way, but for this patch, I found it more accurate to use a picture taken at the camp. Since this is one of the big patches, it needed two pieces of paper to make it the size I wanted. The Eagle badge took 4.

For the writing I copied the words on a paper, cut to the same size - so I could match it to the exact place later - and copied the words, first to the reverse and then to the other side. I found it easier to trace the hand drawn side because it was easier to see the contrast through the paper. After tracing the lines from that side in pencil I did it again in Sharpie so I could see it through the fabric when I traced it on to sew. I believe I also had to trace it on the other side - so the letters were not backwards, too. The words were traced on the fabric lightly in pencil or a Marks-be-gone type marker.

Lots of tracing in this project. All the shapes from the papers were traced onto the iron-on double adhesive, like Wonder-Under or Heat-n-Bond Lite. These have to be the reverse of what you want them to be later.

Not knowing any better, I used the entire piece. If I could go back and do it all again, I would only have the Heat-n-Bond along the outer edges of the pieces rather than the whole thing. All those layers of webbing made the patches rather stiff in the end.  It also adds lots of layers of unnecessary fabric. I would have cut away the under layers of unnecessary fabric to cut down on bulk. But, Oh, well. I'm not re-doing it. Hot Fix has also now been suggested to me to not have the bulk. We live and learn.

I bought a large selection of Kona Cotton fabrics and matched the colors as best I could.  They are not perfect, but without putting things side by side, most wouldn't know. Even my friend who has worked for BSA for 10 years said they looked exact.

Then it's time to place each piece on the correct color and iron them down. I suggest labeling which piece goes with which patch. Even if you think it's obvious, I think it saves a little bit of headache in the end to know which goes where.

Next come the layout. Again, I would recommend only having the webbing on about 1/4" on the raw edges instead of the whole cloth. I drew circles for the outside edges. I think it was about a 10" circle. I found a plate or Tupperware lid that was the right size for both circles. That made drawing the circles easy and kept all of them the same size.

The centers were then ironed onto the center of the gray or green background (which will mimmic the edging on the patch).

Then the pieces are placed on the background fabric.

Here's where I needed the printed copy to be correct and not reversed. Sometimes I would even need to place the paper over the layout to make sure they were in the right place.

When it was right, I carefully pressed. DON'T slide that iron around. You don't want a piece to shift!

You end up with the circles laid out something like this on the gray,

And this on the green. (Yes, there are duplicates. I had two quilts to make.)

Next comes cutting them all apart so you can stitch around them. You'll need to draw the markings on each place you will stitch using your paper to guide you. As you can see, the stitching on the actual patch, when blown up this big, is pretty irregular. You have to smooth that out.

Then you stitch around it with a nice smooth zigzag. You will have to play with your settings to find what you like. I had a few sizes of stitch I used. There was the wider one for most edges and a narrow for detail work. 

I did find that running a basting stitch around the edge helped it not pucker so much when there was not the webbing under the outside square. I also ran the zigzag right along the edge, covering the raw edge. 

When doing details, I would often used a narrower zigzag. And yes, you can see I made a mistake on my line and had to erase. I did the inside details first so the outline of the shape would be done last and cover up the starts and stops.

Et, voilà. It's OK that the outside edge is not perfectly shaped at this point. In fact, since I put it away for a while, and Kona Cotton seems to fray more than other fabrics, I wish I had left a little more on the edge. Then I could trim it right before sewing it down and have fewer frays to deal with.

For most writing, I had to freehand it on the patch since the layers were too thick to use a light table. Maybe if I had written it as I did the NYLT patch I talked about above (which was done long after these patches were done), with writing it on paper with a sharpie and copying it on the fabric when it was only one layer thick, it might have been easier.

With the fingerprint, I contemplated looking at my sons' fingerprints and doing the type of fingerprint they actually have, but in the end I just did my best to do what the actual patch has.  This one was crazy hard because by the time it was blown up this big, the lines were all jumbled.  I actually had an easier time using the actual patch on my son's sash to imitate it. 

For laying out the patches on the dark olive fabric, I used my son's sashes so it would really mimmic their personal scout journeys. We did our best to make sure the patches were in the actual order they earned them.

After laying out the patches on the green and ironing them down (this time I used much less Heat-n-Bond), I laid the tan fabric out with the olive next to it and cut the tan at the correct diagonal to fit, having the same amount of tan visible at the top as I had hidden under the olive. Lots of crawling around on the floor needed for this exercise.

I appliquéd all the patches to the green (probably the most annoying part since you have to turn the entire olive length through the arm of your sewing machine a million times as you turn each patch around in a circle), and all the patches on each tan side before sewing the 3 main pieces together.

For the quilting on the first one, I used Warm and White batting so I could quilt up to 10" apart. With all the webbing in the patches, I didn't want to try and quilt too much in those areas. So, I sewed around the outside of each patch and around the inner circle. (You can see the shadow patches I added to the top and bottom of the olive green area). Each patch on the tan is stitched around the outside of the patch, and with all of those larger than the circle patches had some stitching in the ditch around the central image. Large crosshatching fills the rest of the tan. There is also stitching in the ditch between the green and tan.

The quilting for the other quilt is very similar, with a diamond crosshatch in the tan instead of squares on point crosshatching. 

Donovan's Eagle Quilt

This quilt was 8 years in the making with more in the planning. Many long years ago, my mother made a twin sized Eagle Quilt for my brother when he became an Eagle Scout. The way I remember it was that it had a large Eagle Badge in the center with possibly a border around it with all the patches he earned around it - all appliquéd and larger versions of the tiny patches they put on their sash. I knew when my older boys went into scouts that I would do something like it for them.

When the fabric store that I was working at closed, and the inventory was liquidated, there was a lot of the dark olive green, sash color, and for half price, what could I do with it? I began to rework my plan, did the math and bought lots of the green background color - enough for both quilts. When the older of the two made Life Scout, I knew it was time to really crack down. 

I finished the top shortly after he became an eagle but then put it away to quilt it once I had the Longarm machine I was saving for. Well, I have had my machine for a year and since he was getting married at the begining of this month, and we were driving out there anyway, I thought it would a great thing to quilt this over Christmas break and deliver this finished quilt.  I ordered thread mid-December, but then due to Covid and an surge in mail (as is wont at that time of year), it didn't come, and it didn't come, and it didn't come. 

Finally I looked into my I'll-get-around-to-it-later emails and found that one of the colors was on backorder. So, I found another company that had that color, switched things around so they could ship immediately and ordered from the other company, too. I believe both packages of thread arrived the day we drove out.  Ahh, well. But it's now done and I need to quilt the second eagle quilt this year (or that's my plan).

When I posted these pictures on Facebook, many people requested information on how I made this, so I will put a little tutorial together and post that soon. If you would like to see the tutorial, go here. If you would like to see his brother's quilt, go here.

Keith's Baby Quilt - Americana, Star

 My 20th quilt quilted. This one went to my first grandchild.  As with all my children's baby quilts, there is a matching queen size quilt to match it (which will be shown later). It was so hard to find 5 colors of both the exact red and blue with varying amounts of white. But in the end, it turned out so well, it's hard to tell at first that there are 10 colors plus white in it. 

Custom quilting with lots of stitch in the ditch and ruler work.

I made up this quit pattern based on a kit I saw in the AQS catalog called Backroads which has 3 strips of random colors making up the stars with a black background. Still very striking. Here's a picture of the catalog add.

First Quilt Sold

I designed and began making this quilt as a commissioned quilt for a friend. I think I had it on the frame when she told me she would not be able to buy it anymore. I was sorry for that because it was just what she wanted, but sometimes life happens. However, I had no sooner posted the pictures than I had an offer, so it sold quickly. It is a king size quilt with custom quilting and a pieced back.  The large center portion is a lovely owl fabric surrounded by some patchwork squares. 

Front

Back 

Custom Quilting

Quilting on the scrappy blue squares (above), shown from the back so you can see it better. Sometimes you can see the quilting better from the back because it doesn't compete with the piecing on the front.