Squeeee!!!! Back in May, I sent off a quilt to Generation Q magazine for publication. I’d been working with them for a few months before that, sending sketches and ideas. They picked a sketch of this R2D2 quilt I’d just doodled for fun, and suddenly I found myself actually making my first quilt to be published in a mag.

And not just any quilt, but a geeky Star Wars quilt. I am so in love with how this design came out, and I’ve had to keep my lips sealed about it for almost 8 months now. That was haaaaard. But now I can talk about it nonstop, all day long.

This was the original sketch I sent off. Once the magazine picked it I did some tweaking to get it just right, and to make it more obviously resemble R2. I have a much more detailed sketch of it, but I’m keeping that one to myself. I feel protective of that sketch, which is goofy.

I don’t just like this quilt, I love it. See how nice and sunny and grassy it is in this photo? I shot this on May 20th, the day I finished and mailed it off to the magazine. Kind of a nice reminder on this below freezing January day. It’s so hard to see, but the quilting I did on the white parts of the quilt mimics the grooves and divots on R2D2’s body.

I made the quilt in 4 sections, and I’m thrilled that GenQ kept that in the instructions. It’s just how it made sense to me putting it together. This was the top section in progress:

I’m really proud of myself for this one. It’s actually an incredibly easy quilt to put together once you get your head around it. But for me it’s just the coolest thing to have doodled an idea a year ago, thinking no one would see it but me, and now there it is in a magazine.