Alice's Daydream Quilt--Grandkids' Daydreams

I’ve spent so much time with our four grandchildren this summer that I decided to focus on their daydreams.  Our granddaughter is 11, nearly 12, and her life right now revolves around her friends.  The little boys are all three totally focused on sports!  The two Michigan boys (nearly 11 and 8) played both Little League and were on select, “travel” teams, and so their daydreams center on baseball.  The California grandson (nearly 9) is an expert swimmer and on his local swim team.  He was in the relay finals, and his team won all three of their relays, and so I have him daydreaming about that event.

I have a huge stash of commercial quilting fabric with “juvenile” themes, and so I was delighted to find baseball players, young girls having fun together, and swimming boys and girls.  I made extensive use of Wonder Under fusible for this quilt, fusing this product to the backs of all the fabrics just mentioned, plus browns for the boys’ hair, some gold swirly fabric for Lia’s pony tail, and then various colors of fabric for their shirts.  I decided to use a piece of a discarded crazy quilt project for the daydream “thought bubbles.”  I wanted them to have some dimension, and since this project was stitched onto batting already, it worked well.  I cut the bubbles leading up to the thought bubbles from a multi-colored polka dot fabric.

I used some previously painted sky fabric for the background, which I machine quilted.  The larger appliqués were first fused to the background and then were machine appliquéd down with a tiny zig-zag stitch.  (I simply fused the simpler, smaller shapes down with the Wonder Under.)  I backed the quilt with the swimming-children fabric, and I used the sky fabric for the binding.