This project has been in my head for some time now.  I love maps and seem to have lots of them around my house.  That’s right, I don’t care all that much for GPS!  I really like to be able to see the big picture.  Anyway, I kept imagining what a quilted map would look like with patchwork pieces to represent counties and towns.  Or when you fly over some places and see all the fields and they look like patchwork pieces.

I wasn’t really sure how to get started on this so I just got out my Missouri map and started cutting.  Basically, I cut the state out and then cut that into some sections and pieced it like a crazy quilt.  I’ve never done a crazy quilt before but I’ve done lots of paper piecing.  You really have to have fairly small blocks to work with (which I didn’t always do) and you have to think it through before you just start sewing fabrics together so that you’re building & adding on as you go around a central piece of fabric(I also did not do this too well).

After I had the whole map pieced together, I ripped the paper off the back and ironed some double sided fusible interfacing to the back and stuck it to a background piece of fabric.  Then I appliqued it using a decorative stitch on my sewing machine.  I quilted the map part using lots of my machine’s decorative stitches on the seam lines between the patchwork.  Sadly, you can’t really see that in this picture but I used lots of different colored threads as well.  I quilted the rest of the quilt using a meandering stitch and then pieced together fabrics for the binding.

I think you can see more of the binding in the picture below.  This type of quilt could be done with just about any kind of map I think.