Quilting for a Nerd

Do you have a Nerd in your family? Perhaps several, or if you are like me, an army of Nerds? Designing a new quilt for a lovable nerd, especially a male nerd, can be challenging. They do not want flowers or baby animals adorning their quilts! They may not appreciate the wonders of purple batiks or metallic Japanese prints!

My grandson turns 16 in 2020 and 16 is one of the magical ages for a new quilt for my grandchildren. I made each a baby quilt, and then a twin size around 5 years, another at 11 years old and now another for the big 16.

He is into robotics and attending a high school program called IDEA – Industrial Design and Engineering Arts. His dream quilt has circuit boards! I went to Spoonflower and pulled up some circuit board designs. There is something for every nerd on Spoonflower. The color request is for blue and green. Check! I found blue and green in circuit board on the site and his preference was the black background.

Now how to incorporate these dark colors into a pleasing quilt pattern? EQ8 to the rescue! This is my second quilt designed in this software and I am still in the early stages of learning it. I simply (yes, very simply) put up a on point pattern of diamonds within squares and added sashing strips in between. Then I download fabric photos from the internet to populate my basic pattern.

For the background, I wanted to use some stash fabric. A nice Moda grunge dot in dark blue fills the bill nicely and I have 3 yards. Perfect! For the cornerstone squares, I will use a reverse of the Moda grunge dots with dark dots on lighter blue that I also have in stash. At least that is the current plan. Again, I downloaded photos from internet images of the Moda to populate my EQ8 design.

After a morning and an afternoon spent clicking and importing, I had an overall design that he loved and that I felt would make an interesting quilt. The squares are nice and large and will display the circuit board patterns nicely, which also leaves nice space for Free Motion Quilting. And it will sew together relatively quickly.

My Bernina is still in the shop for her annual maintenance, so I am waiting on her return before picking up my ongoing projects.

My list of 2020 projects includes: completing the master bed project that I started in Dec, this project, a new (yet to be decided) applique project, a commission smoking jacket, a new smoking jacket for Tom,  a couple whole cloth quilt panels, completing Lily Rose blue, Elizabeth Hartman’s Pretty Bird quilt, and a bookcase quilt for my daughter who works in a book store. And reducing my stash!

Happy quilting and sewing to all, Lennea