Chemistry Duvet Cover (lots 'o' pics)

[cherry_blossom55]

You may or may not have seen a post I did back in the fall when I was in the planning stages of making a quilt for my boyfriend for Christmas, featuring the "periodic table of the elements", because he is a Chemistry major, and I thought he'd find it totally epic.


It's rather late, because life has been busy and hectic, but here is the finished product. Unfortunately, It became a duvet cover instead of a quilt because of a) time constraints and the fact that I still had gifts for 7 or 8 other people that I was making and b) buying the batting for the inside would have put me $50 over budget instead of just $10 over. (shh, don't tell him. )


These rectangles took me longer than anything. I cut each one 9x12cm individually and then one-by-one ran them through my printer stuck to a piece of paper with the info for each of the 118 sections of the periodic table. (I ended up doing over 130 because there were some screw-ups) I laid them out on my bedroom floor like this to make sure everything was correct. (oh and there's a shot of my hedgehog pincushion in the top pic - i followed a tute i found on craftster for that, but don't know where it is now)




Here they are all sewn into the vertical column strips of the table, which I then sewed together from one end of the table to the other, double checking EVERY TIME so that I didn't put anything in the wrong place!

I don't have a picture of the next step of the process because I did it on the day I was supposed to give it to him and only had one thing on my mind:GETTER DONE! Basically, once all the pieces were sewn together I took my huge amounts of black cotton and sewed the two chunks together to make it wide enough for our queen bed, then I ironed all the edges of the actual periodic-table part under (using our room-mate's hair straightener because we don't have an iron - this is how I press all my seams), and topstitched it on to the huge rectangle of black cotton. (not as easy as I just made it sound, I pinned things over and over and over to get it straight and free of wrinkles, and had to sew underneath along some of the vertical seams to keep it stuck down to the backing instead of being all bubbly-pockety.

Then I made a huge rectangle of blue-stripey facbric to sew to the back, turned it right side out and put our thermal blanket inside. looking around my room at that point I noticed I had a lot of the stripey fabric left and some of the blue that I used in the periodic table, and a couple extra hours, so as an afterthought I made two pillowcases, just because I'm really nice. So here it is in all its glory!...




These are what the old pillowcases looked like - one disney princess and one pink version of my favourite band's logo. he hated them, you understand. lol. I made him a manly bed.

Questions/comments welcome, and thanks for looking!

[tardmuffin]

So, wait, you just printed directly onto the fabric with a regular printer? Can you explain, because that sounds way too good to be true.

And I am SO jealous of your boyfriend. My refrigerator is covered in a giant periodic table but I'd kill for that duvet cover.

[flower]

MAGNIFICENT!  Hitting "This Rocks" now!

[Knitting_Chemistry]

wow!  That is amazingly awesome!  I am a chemistry major as well and I am geeky enough to admit that I would love a periodic table blanket! I am in awe of your tenacity to get that done!   Now I may have to try and convince my mom to make me one (she's a quilter/sew-er....me not so much...)   Amazing!!  

[Tamschro]

Love it!  I want one!

Also curious about the printing process.

[Aliped]

That is fabulous!  well done!

[FeeSewBug]

It's so geeky I'm in LOVE!!!!

I was told you could print directly onto fabric but i wasn't convinced....it looks so good!!!

[cherry_blossom55]

okay I'll explain the printing process in more detail.

I made a rectangular stencil about .5 of a cm bigger than my fabric squares, and used it as a mask to apply spray-adhesive (just the regular elmer's brand) to plain old white printer paper. The beautiful thing about spray adhesive is that if you let it sit for a minute or so before sticking the fabric on, it's a temporary bond, so you can peel it off. You have to make sure that what you are printing is lined up with where you put the fabric very carefully, but once you stick the fabric to the tacky paper, it just sails right through a regular inkjet printer, and you can peel it off and use that layer f adhesive 3 or 4 more times. to be careful, i made sure it was the only piece of paper in the feed tray.

Oh, and i also forgot to mention in my post that if you don't seal the ink it will run when/if it gets wet. because fabric pre-treatments are expensive, I simply sprayed a very liberal amount of shoe protector (which I already had) over the periodic table after i had sewed the rectangles all together and before I attached it to the backing. AND while printing you have to be extremely careful of stray threads on the fabric squares becasue they can get caught in the printer mechanism. NOT GOOD

hope that clears things up, and thanks for the comments everyone!

[JLMS]

My husband got a degree in Chemistry a long time age, and I wish I had this idea back then. I love this!

[TheMistressT]

Brilliant and generous!   I LOVE the periodic table and various riffs on it and yours is great!