TARDIS Quilt Beginnings

If you're unfamiliar with a TARDIS--it is the British police-box-time-machine from the Dr Who television series.  This is a commissioned quilt from my brother's girlfriend, Andrea, but I am pretty excited to be working on it!

Early on I found a cheater TARDIS on Spoonflower, and Andrea agreed to it.

Took about 2 weeks to get here, sheesh!

I liked the cheater quilt idea for a few reasons: it was faster, simpler, and would be fun to quilt!  But it wasn't until after we ordered it that we started really talking about the back of the quilt.  And the idea of densely quilting the TARDIS went out.  Andrea wanted a Starry Night inspired back, from the season 5, episode 10,  which I haven't seen yet.  In the episode Van Gogh paints the TARDIS into his Starry Night painting, which you can see here.

So I started with some sketches, and it quickly became apparent to me that fancy quilting on the front wouldn't complement the back:

Top left: basic sketch.  Top Right: trying to figure out how to translate it into squares and HST.  Bottom left: trying to figure out scale.  Bottom right: scale and grid of blocks. 

As I was working on the small scale sketches, my husband inquired about what I was doing.  I explained and complained about issues I was having, and he suggested making larger, scrappy-esque hexagon blocks like on the rainbow quilt.  After thinking about it for a while, I realized that that style of piecing would give the quilt a nicer swirl-y feel, while also adding a lot of texture (which was seriously lacking when compared to the real Starry Night).

So I worked on a new sketch, with general colors and scale (the blocks will be a vague interpretation of this):

The blocks will be 10.5" x 11" finished, making a nice full sized quilt about 84" x 88" (minus quilting and first wash shrinkage).

So last week I decided to practice my paper piecing on a mini-TARDIS for the back of the quilt (I used the TARDIS v2 pattern from this site.):

The TARDIS is about 6".  

I know I said I was done with paper piecing for a long while (it can be rather frustrating, especially with small children constantly distracting you!).  But then I found the pattern maker's tutorial for paper piecing, and things went so much smoother!  Something about the paper folding and fabric positioning finally made sense to me!  I had no issues putting together the mini-TARDIS (aside from forgetting the 4th window, oops).  The only thing I don't like about that little TARDIS is the missing light on top.  I've since turned it into something more functional than an unfinished quilt block, and added a little light to the top.

So far it's been kind of slow going.  I kinda burned out on quilting after my rush to finish the SquarePants quilt last week.  In the meantime I've been making a bunch of zippered pouches though!  I got my order of 30 zippers from ZipIt today, so I'm ready to make some more!  I will post them soon.  :-)