When my son traveled to Philmont with his scout troop a few years ago, I decided I was going to start and complete a surprise quilt for him while he was gone. Thankfully, my daughter Josie volunteered to help me!
My son has been interested in programming for as long as I can remember, so while searching for a nerdy computer pattern of some sort, I stumbled across this idea. It’s on theme without being overt and repurposes old plaid shirts. Perfect! A quick trip to the thrift store and we were ready to wash and disassemble and press all of the pretty, “new” fabric.
We were able to find a good selection of blues and grays, with a few pops of orange.
The general idea of the pattern is to create “ones” and “zeros” and use those to spell out words or names using ASCII or binary code. To keep the measurements simple, we made 9-inch finished blocks.
Once we had the correct number of blocks, Josie helped me arrange them in both the proper order and in a visually pleasing way with regard to color and value.
Start to finish, this quilt took us almost 2 full weeks. The quilting on my domestic sewing machine took seemingly FOREVER. In hindsight I would’ve picked a simpler quilting design, but the texture is great and I’m very happy with the way it turned out. It was a good project to keep me distracted and with less time to worry about how the Philmont trip was going. Which, even though we don’t talk about Philmont at our house (inside joke), happened to be going really well and remains a great and memorable experience for my son.
But seriously, the quilting took me so long that I was still binding the quilt the night before his return. This turned out to be not so bad, because his scheduled train was significantly delayed out of Raton, New Mexico. The troop was traveling home much later into the night, so it was just as well that I was up quilting into the wee hours. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.
This is one of my favorite finished quilts and since he uses it often, I think my son likes it as well. We used a flannel backing on this and since the shirts were already soft, the overall quilt has been very cozy since the beginning. No break-in period required.
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