Car Mat Quilt

It was a car Christmas for my boys. I've been collecting fun hotwheels/matchbox cars for a little while now with this car mat in mind. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find basic cars like mail trucks, school buses, fire trucks, ambulances, etc? You can always find tons of ridiculous "concept cars" that look really, well, dumb. But there is usually a serious shortage of normal ones. And hey, has anyone out there EVER seen a matchbox minivan??


Anyway. I digress. Here's my project:

I must say, this project evolved, evolved, and evolved again every step of the way. I ran into so many snags -- wrong products purchased, wrong amounts of fabric purchased (more than once!!), forgetting vital components to the "city," measuring wrong more than once, etc. Sigh. Some projects just seem doomed from the beginning.

But I muddled through, and here it is!


(What city is complete without a place for dinosaurs to play -- complete with erupting volcano, lake, and cliffs?)


Parking spaces -- and lots of them -- are an absolute MUST.

How I did it:

It started a few months back with a roll of butcher paper and a Sharpie. (There is just something about drawing with Sharpies!!) I taped a large sheet of the paper onto the kitchen table and started drawing, taking cues from the boys as I went along.

We loved how it turned out, and it actually stayed on the table for a couple weeks. We just ate our meals right on top of it! I started thinking about how to make it permanent and, being a quilter, of course fabric was my first thought.

I drew a bunch of pictures on 8 1/2" x 11" paper, scanned them in to the computer, and colored them in Photoshop. My intention was to print them on fabric sheets you run through the printer (yes, you can make these yourself with your own fabric and freezer paper and save a million bucks), then sew black sashing in between to create roads. I busted out my store-bought fabric sheets, ripped the package open, and realized I had purchased FUSIBLE fabric sheets --basically fabric with fusible webbing ironed on the back. So each "block" section of my city is fused onto a large piece of black fabric. I was going to use yellow ribbon to make the dotted lines on the roads, but ended up using the scrap edges of my fusible fabric, cut in itty-bitty pieces, all ironed on one...at...a...time. I also eyeballed the center of my fabric, which accounts for the one end that is a one-way street. After layering the quilt together, I quilted by sewing down the edges of each fused on piece. For the dotted lines, I sewed straight down the middle using monofilament thread.

Oh well. It isn't my original vision (personally I like the black-and-white butcher paper drawing better!), but it did turn out fairly cute and they do like it.


What I learned:

I wouldn't recommend the fusible fabric sheets. They are super stiff, making it difficult (and somewhat worrisome!) to fold the quilt. And they definitely are not 100% cotton. They almost feel a little plasticky. One difference between the fusible fabric sheets and the sew-in fabric sheets is that you can set the ink after printing on the sew-in sheets by soaking them in water and pressing them dry with an iron. With the fusible fabric sheets there was no way to do that. I am concerned about the ink's durability. I think I would be too scared to wash this quilt (fabric says hand wash only but I'd be afraid of even doing that). Guess we'll just find out how it wears!