Life is a field trip

Today is the last day of school, and I finished the quilt for the teacher with about 12 hours to spare. Here it is with my two sons, who each spent three years with this teacher (her name is Sid) in a multi-aged classroom, called Room 303. Since they overlapped by one year, our family had Sid as a teacher for five years. The son in the yellow is just crawling out of bed for his last day of elementary school. (In Canada, elementary school usually goes until the end of June. We start up again after Labour Day or the first weekend in September.)
I backed it with flannel, put a bamboo batting in it, and handquilted it on the diagonal through the darker squares and around the stars. I used cotton quilting thread for the borders and some of the stars, but most of it is quilted in big stitches with perle cotton and a big needle I broke several needles with it, after I learned from embroiderers one can't quilt with a chenille needle -- I was supposed to stab stitch, not load up multiple stitches. This is made up entirely of scraps, with those four patches in the nine patch blocks from the 2 inch square box, and the bigger patches from my mother's scrap pile. There's some very old prints here, but I was going for a muted effect with the nine patches, and it works. The stars are wonky a la Gwen Marston, and I used Tonya's letters for the top and bottom. In case you can't read it, it says "Life is a field trip" on the top and the bottom says "Sid, star of 303."


I think you can see some of the quilting in this picture. You can certainly see the busy little prints from the early 80s. Not my favourites, but they just blend together for the most part. I am wishing that I tea-dyed those white squares on the 9 patch on the right. Too late. This is a true scrap quilt, which is exactly what Sid has to do as a teacher every year. She takes a bunch of students who don't necessarily fit together, and by the end of the year, they're working together as a group. They're still individuals, but they've learned to respect and appreciate each other. Huge life lessons, and we're grateful we had a great elementary school teacher like her.
For those of you with eagle eyes, can you spot the Hoffman Painted Desert fabrics in here? They're all visible in the top picture of the whole quilt. There are three colourways of it (the light patches, in the words, and the border/binding fabric.) I really used a lot of old fabrics in this quilt.