Star Wars Quilt Swap on Instagram #maythe4thmqs2

This is my Finish #1 from my Q2 FAL list.

Early this year I signed up for the ‘May the Force be with you’ mini quilt swap (part 2) on Instagram. Couldn’t miss this swap especially when I didn’t participate in part 1. This swap was organised by Jen @justjoshinkids. It was due on 4th May (Star Wars day), which means I had to finish it around the end of April and to send it to a partner allocated to me by the host.

I really enjoyed the process of making a mini quilt for my partner, Genevieve @eveofdestruxion. I found a FPP pattern of Rey on the Fandom in Stitches website, that has all Star Wars quilt patterns collected in one place. It directed me to AngelaGross86’s Pattern Store on Craftsy where I got the pattern for free.

Here are some stages of putting it all together below:

Decided to make Goosing Borders – free pattern by Kelly @jeliquilts

I was thinking of making a face for Rey. Didn’t feel right to make her faceless. The pattern suggests to embroider the face. I was very much in doubt about embroidery in this case. I am not the best embroiderer around so I definitely didn’t want to spoil her with my attempts. The last page of the pdf pattern also has a photo of Rey’s face that is a perfect scale and could be a good guidance for embroidery. But I thought that I might use it a bit differently. I was thinking of finding a company that can print Rey’s face on a piece of nude Kona cotton fabric. I told my idea to my sister in law and she reminded me about the existence of iron-on transfer paper.

That was it! I bought this paper!

I cut out the picture from the last page of the pdf pattern and it fitted perfectly. However there were 2 crossed lines on it (you can see them on the photo below) and to be able to iron-on the photo, I would need a mirror image of the face.

My wonderful husband was very helpful and his superior photoshop knowledge came in very handy! We found an original photo of Rey from which the pattern was made just by googling “Rey” 🙂 My darling made a good mirror image of the face without any lines on and I printed it on iron-on transfer paper.

Obviously it was very exciting to do it ASAP and I started ironing it on rather late in the evening. It came out alright… but I didn’t notice tiny lint and fabric hair on the surface of my nude cotton 🙁 As a result I could see them through the tiny face layer that I stuck to the fabric moments ago and there was no way to remove or redo it. SIGH and cries and ripping of of hair…

I couldn’t leave it like that! I just had to make the face again.

Trust me it looked worse in the real life than on the pic below 🙁

After some consideration I unpicked the top border from right to nearly end of left, unpicked the right border till the place when it meets the bottom border. Then I unpicked very carefully the whole triangle with the head and foundation paper pieced this triangle again with new pieces of fabrics.

As I believe that I learn from my mistakes I did it differently this time. I ironed on the face few times to my Kona cotton fabric instead of one time on a sewn together final piece of work. Thus I had few faces to chose from. Apparently even after I cleaned this light cotton few times from the lint very carefully, it was still there somehow and was visible through the attached face layer.

I picked the neatest looking face finally and cut it with some sort of seam allowance. Then it was very tricky to sew it very central to the place on the pattern where the face goes. As far as I remember I had to unpick and reattach it couple of times to make it more or less straight. Finally success! PHEW!

The previous version’s face looked a bit straighter, but I am very happy with how clean this face is!!!

You might think that I’m a bit too much with all these remaking, but it really bothered me and I wanted to make it right 🙂 Plus I learned a lot in the process!

Boring bit – paper removing