Mission to Mars Quilt

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It’s always an exciting day for us when we get to show off another quilt that’s been months in the making. “Mission to Mars” is our most recent quilt kit release with Craftsy.

Since the 1960’s, every kid has wanted to fly to the moon. We were inspired by the early children’s book illustrations of riding in a rocket ship to the stars (something from Diane’s childhood), and by this fun and retro futuristic fabric line, Space Camp.

This is our first foundation paper pieced (FPP) pattern; just the rockets and stars are made this way. We love how easy FPP makes creating complex shapes from our sketches.

We also have a deep love of rockets in our family. Diane’s husband, Doug, is a real-life rocket scientist, just like his father before. Doug and Diane were even able to attend the last-ever launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis!

We took the Mission to Mars quilt to the Utah State University Space Dynamics Lab for a photoshoot, with Audrey’s husband’s decommissioned rocket-propelled grenade tagging along.

The color palette for this quilt is just perfect: bright and happy, but not your typical primary colors.

Here’s our quilt label. This one was made with printable fabric, but you can also use our other method for making quilt labels here.

Another exciting new feature in the Craftsy kits is that you will now get a printed pattern with the kit, instead of just the digital download. That means that all of your FPP pages will be printed for you!

We quilted this with a large-scale, offset figure-eight design, which plays well with the planets and overall theme of the quilt.

Those individual prints are just so much fun! This quilt finishes to 68″ x 80″, so it’s quite a bit bigger than a baby quilt and perfect for kids of all ages.

Although this is an intermediate quilt (meaning that you should have a working knowledge of how to FPP before you start this), we added lots of traditionally pieced blocks into the rest of the quilt to give you a break. It makes the project much more manageable!

We have been planning to do a tutorial on foundation paper piecing, so watch for that in the next little while, with a free block pattern!

As always, the pattern is only available as the Mission to Mars quilt kit for a contracted time with Craftsy. After a few months, we can offer the pattern separately from the kit, but in the case of this quilt, we think this fabric is a perfect pairing. We hope you’ve enjoyed seeing this quilt and hearing more about it!