High School Musical Quilt

We're All in This Together
-High School Musical

We're all in this together / Once we know / That we are / We're all stars / And we see that / We're all in this together / And it shows / When we stand / Hand in hand / Make our dreams come true

We're all in this together / When we reach / We can fly / Know inside / We can make it / We're all in this together / Once we see / There's a chance / That we have / And we take it

This summer LadyBug asked me to make her a High School Musical quilt. At the time I was elbow-deep in New Moon Charity Quilt preparations, so I gave her some grid paper and told her to draw out what she wanted her quilt to look like. Here's what she came up with (click on any of the pictures for a closer look).

She told me that she wanted the outside edges to have a pattern in them and that she wanted a wildcat in the middle with the characters in the squares around that. I had her list out the characters that she wanted and then we went fabric shopping. She helped my pick out fabrics. We'd been doing sewing lessons together over the summer and so as part of one of her lessons she helped me a bit with the rotary cutting.

I used Cat's UNI Panther pattern for the school mascot, a Wildcat, reversing it, enlarging it to 200% it and adding a few more spikes to the fur.

We choose pictures of the cast and printed them out on washable fabric sheets.

I made appliqué letters to spell out the name of the High School the characters attend.

Then I put the quilt away for a while. In the week between Christmas and New Year's, I pulled it back out and finished it. The finished size is 62" x 62". I absolutely love how the checkerboard border came out.

After the top was finished, I sent it to Angie to be quilted. She really worked with me to get the quilting that I wanted in it, adding in some really special details. She did a fabulous job.

Confetti quilted in around the Wildcat.

Close-ups of some of the amazing details. A couple of 'catch phrases' from the movies quilted in. They are above and below the Wildcat:

The names of each character quilted in under their picture.

A basketball and a musical score quilted on either end of the word 'School.'

These music notes are quilted in around the pictures of the characters.

Basketballs, hoops and loops quilted throughout the five borders.

And this is the best photograph yet -- the quilt in use. Isn't LadyBug adorable? She picked the red checkered fabric for the pillowcase herself, saying that it would 'coordinate' with the checkerboard in the quilt. Quilter in training? Judge for yourself. She's already picking up the lingo.