Finally, Some Pictures

Here it is. The finished product.  And of course, the ever present three year old model. 
I've known this sister-in-law now for going on eight years and I've seen some of her fabric choices and how she's decorated.  I have a theory that people have fabric personalities whether they know it or not.  So with that theory I tried to go with a geometric, clean, graphic look that can sometimes be bold.  It was about that scientific.  Although I did use graph paper when I was planning this one, so maybe it was a little scientific. 
I did robots and a bunch of checkerboard bits.  Deconstructed checkerboard is the glorified name I've given it, but really it's just overlapping checkerboard bits. 

 As you can see it is exactly one three year old long.  Here are close-ups of the robots.  Turns out it was kinda tricky coming up with the robots.  There's the classic robot, but then what?  The girl actually designed the third one.

 This is the girl's robot.  She chose his shape and I tricked him out.  His numbers can be made into B2's birthday.  The loops on the 8's are each sewn individually so that his mom can snip out the extras and make it B2 specific. 

 I put a bunch of nuts and gears on the blanket, robot parts of course.

 And wrenches.  I love the wrenches.  I made them with an extra layer of super fluffy batting so they have tons of poof.  I love me some poof.  Then I appliqued my little wrench quilts onto my quilt top.

 I did the same for the big gears and the number pad square has extra batting too.  It's for imputing things with your robot.  I don't have a robot so I don't know what kind of things you would input, maybe how many scoops of ice cream to bring you. 

 And then there's the binary.  Sigh.  I used geeky translators to get their last name into binary and used some of my fancy smanchy embroidery floss to really carefully put it in all equidistant.  Doesn't it look great?  What's that? You can't actually see it?  Yeah, shouldn't have use yellow.  Curse you farsighted eyes.  I promise if you were holding it a foot from your face you would be able to see it perfectly.  Next time, no yellow on a patterned fabric.  But trust me, it looks good.  And really, B2 will have a pretty close view, so he can back me up on the actual beauty of the binary.

 Here it is sans child measuring stick.  As a whole I think it works.  That's not to say that it doesn't have a lot going on, but I think it's a good kind of lot.

 See the poof.  My future quilter wanted to pick it up.

 The quilt method on this one was to quilt outside the squares.  I thought it might connect some of the checkerboard a bit more and it would work with the lattice-esque fabric of B2's drapes.  Since it's the opposite of my vanity quilting I'm calling it my modesty quilting.  I have a dorky love for words. 

 I used three different yellow patterns and as orange patterns were all too girly for my taste I used a solid orange.  The solid turned out being a nice balance to the patterns.   I used two blues.  The main blue for my blank squares, and a secondary blue dot for the background of the robots and the occasional little blank square in some of the smaller checkerboards.

 Here's the view once B2 starts holding his head up.

There are a few things I would do differently and a couple squares I wouldn't include again, but I had fun on this one.  I love the wrenches so much that someday I might just make some crazy quilt with tools everywhere.