Who's the leader of the club?

Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?  M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!

This song, real title “The Mickey Mouse Club March”, will be familiar to anyone around in the mid to late 1950’s, especially if you were a kid watching ABC’s “The Mickey Mouse Club”.  Well, Mickey happened to turn up at TGQ HQ recently!

Two different customers brought in items either to be quilted or created for family members of this Disney icon.

First, Marlo brought us a Mickey quilt to finish.  It should be noted she designed this quilt and it is her first quilt e-v-e-r and it is a queen size!  Not only did she find time to create the original design and sew the top, but did so with two small children at home.  We were impressed!  She did a really nice job of piecing the top and wanted a whimsical finish for it.  We kept it under wraps as it was a Christmas gift for her mother, but I’ve been dying to share it - here it is!

A photo of Mickey before he went home.

Then just before Christmas, Mary Ann brought in a couple Disney panels and a calendar tea towel that is the year her grandson was born and asked us to finish all three.  I knew Mickey now had a new club! A quilt club with these four coming out of TGQ! It was then this journal entry started marching through my head….

For the tea towel, she had fabric to use, but deciding how to set it was the challenge.  Instead of trying to make it the size of the rest of the blocks, I decided to make it the center and build around it with various borders. The quilting has some large curley q's for the majority of the top with the tea towel having custom quilting to add fireworks and highlight the months.

This is not Mickey holding the quilt.  Mickey would never be caught dead in royal blue running shoes!

For the panels, we used solid “Mickey” colours to add borders – yellow and black. 

Both of these were done as an edge-to-edge quilting.  We thought the panel with stars in it should have stars in the quilting.  While the other panel has an easy, rippling pattern through it. It is similar to what we did on Marlo's, but with a little more open pattern.

We found a fun pattern for the back, an “old school” look because the black wasn’t a deep black, but more of a weathered, or old, look.  Because of that, I didn’t want a bright red or bright black binding.  I found a red with black dot that had the same distressed type look.

This is the back and binding used on both panels.  Mickey with the stars in quilt pattern is shown above.

It was fun having Mickey in the house, but now it's time to "come along and sing the song and join the jamboree! M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e"  (Apologies if that’s your new ear worm!)