Kid Art Becomes Art Quilt

Imagination is a magical part of a child's world. If the only things available to a kid are sticks and mud, he will play and build an entire world complete with bad guys, a hero, buildings and vehicles which make delightful noises as they zoom around.

Give a child a brand new box of crayons and without hesitation he’s ready to color the world – and sometimes the walls. When my 2-year-old son was supposed to be taking a nap, the only art supply he could find was a ballpoint ink pen. The result? A lovely mural along the baseboard that stretched about 4 feet along the wall. How I wish I'd had him write his name and then taken a picture instead of worrying about how I was going to remove the ink before anyone saw it.

If you’ve been lucky enough to accumulate art from some of the kids in your life, why not do something to preserve it? If you haven't seen it for a while, open those boxes and drawers and look for hidden treasures.

You might even find something YOU created as a kid! I bet there are a few great memories waiting for you to revisit, too.

Of course you can frame or proudly display Kid Art, but have you thought about using it as inspiration for your own ideas?

After finding two adorable drawings by a little girl hidden away in a drawer, I couldn’t wait to see how they would look if I combined them together into one small art quilt. 

 After enlarging the images, I drew a rough sketch on plain paper and then created a tracing paper master pattern. HINT: Be sure to save your master pattern to serve as a placement guide for the fabric pieces.

Next, I selected fabrics and began building the quilt background. Steam-a-Seam 2 (a pressure sensitive, fusible adhesive) added to the back of each fabric before cutting the shapes made the task so much easier!

I created the adorable character in colorful fabric as well as the other foreground images, staying as close to the original Kid Art as possible.

Once everything was in place, I pressed the entire piece to fuse everything together and added lots of machine stitching with rayon threads for structural as well as decorative purposes. I love it! The only thing left to add –  twisted yarns for the border.

I can’t wait until the little girl (now 23) who created the original artwork sees what I did with her art! And I can't wait to tell her how grateful I am that she shared her drawings with me.

Be sure to check out the next episode of Tips ‘n Tricks where I’ll show you a couple of ways to hang small art quilts.

If you use Kid Art to inspire your projects, tweet me photos @BarbOwenDesigns. I'd love to see and share them.

Remember to get creative today! It’s easy!

Barb