Monopoly Quilt

You remember I told you about the Holiday Grand Monopoly Tournament recently?  Well it's the second born's 10th birthday soon (as he's been reminding us on an hourly basis since Christmas) and I got thinking I'd like to make him a quilt.  (Oh, by the way, we need to keep this a secret ok?  No telling him, shhh!) I wanted to make it really unique, something just for him and although grown ups appreciate that each quilt is unique, how many small boys are that interested.  So it had to be something A Bit Good.  Then  I had an idea....and there was BIG excitement in the week day home this week following the arrival of a special package from America!!  It really is printed Monopoly fabric!!!  Whoop di doop!

It took a couple of evenings to thrash out a suitable design.  The limitations were that there was very little allowance between the different design elements such as the chance cards and the money to allow a seam.  I couldn't use the houses and hotel border seen on the top of the fabric because there was no allowance at all. I could have just sewn a border around the whole piece but I wanted more symmetry, more balance.  I also wanted the money to be closest to the board and all the same way up but again, the way the fabric is printed meant I had to re-think.

 In the end I opted for a mirror image which works quite nicely when viewed from the short ends of the quilt.

Once the design was planned it sewed up quickly.  But it unpicked very, very slowly :(  The seams were sooo tight and the straight lines had to be sooo straight that some of these seams and borders were unpicked up to 4 times before I got it right!  In the whole quilt there are only 2 seams which went in right first time.  Humph!  It's not clear in the picture above but those thin blue lines around the outside edge of the board have a 1 inch border sewn in between them and the start of the money.  They took several attempts because I kept accidentally doing wobbly sewing over the blue lines and bits of them disappeared. It looked too bad to be left.  Sigh.  On the plus side I am now so good at unpicking I'm expecting to take gold at the Olympics.  And the finished top below is 3ft x 5 ft which I reckon is just about boy sized!