Dreamliner

We’re finally on the last block! Once we’ve completed this block, all we have to do is put the whole thing together and bind it!

The 787 Dreamliner was the first program I worked at Boeing, so it will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s innovative, new, plastic, and awesome. It is very rewarding for me to fly on one and know that I have personally made differences in the design and manufacturing of such an amazing airplane. Here a link to a video of the 787-9 crew practicing their performance at Farnborogh, an airshow in England. It’s quite impressive what this crew can do with a commercial airliner!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZRKm6PG918

For this block, we’re going to make a fabric sticker of the 787-8, and use fusible web to attach it to the background fabric.

Materials:

16” x 16” (ish) piece of batting
16” x 16” (ish) backing fabric
16” x 16” (ish) of background fabric
12” x 11” (ish) of accent fabric
12” x 11” (ish) piece of fusible web (like Wonder-Under)
(2) Pieces of freezer paper
Pen or marker

Sewing:

First, print out this homemade PDF with the airplane template. Print it at 100%, and tape the pieces together so you’ve got one airplane. If you don’t print it at 100%, your airplane won’t be to scale, which is important (to me!)

Iron the 2 pieces of freezer paper together, overlapping them by 2”-3” so that it will cover the entire airplane template. Place the freezer paper on top of the template, and trace the airplane onto the freezer paper.

Iron the fusible web onto the back of your accent fabric piece. It is really important to do this before you cut out the airplane otherwise you’ll end up making a mess out of fusible web trying to attach it later. Just trust me on this; don’t make the same mistake I did!

Iron the freezer paper airplane template onto the accent fabric piece, and carefully cut it out. I found using small applique scissors with a really sharp tip to be the most helpful during this.

Once the airplane is cut out of fabric, peel off the fusible web backing paper, position the airplane onto the center of the background fabric piece, and iron it on. Yet another block that we’ve completed without sewing!

Baste the airplane quilt top, batting, and backing fabric together using your preferred basting method. Then quilt however you want! I used a blanket stitch to carefully go around my airplane to make sure that it was attached really well, and then quilted some curvy lines echoing the airplane to add some interest into the blank spaces.

Extra credit

This month, we’re also going to do some prep work for final assembly, so that there is less work to do in December when finishing the quilt. We are going to make all of the binding that we’ll need to put all of the blocks together.

Materials:

5/8 yard of binding fabric

For assembly of the quilt, we’re going to use single fold binding to attach the pieces. We need 544” of binding.

To get 544” of binding, you will need 14 strips of WOF. This a conservative estimate claiming that the WOF is 40” instead of 42”. Cut (14) 1.5” wide strips of fabric from your binding fabric.

Now you have a few choices, depending on your sewing style:

Cut and iron more strips of fabric than you need, and avoid sewing anything together (maximizes waste, but minimizes work!)
Cut your strips out now, put off ironing them for now, and iron them as you use/need them
Sew all of the strips together into one mega strip, iron it in half, cut each piece to the appropriate size, and be ready for sewing in December
Make it up as you go

I made it up as I went along. I cut out a bunch of strips, sewed some accent fabric pieces into the middle of some of them, ironed them all in half, and just grabbed binding strips from the pile whenever I needed one when I was putting the quilt together. If a piece wasn’t long enough, I grabbed another one. Towards the end, I was sewing binding strips together to get strips that were long enough, but I tended towards “more waste less stress” than trying to figure it all out ahead of time.

I think the ideal way to go about this is to (at the very least) prep (18) 16” long strips and (4) 64” long strips. This will put you in a very good position to quickly put the quilt together next month!