Making a pizza quilt: Part 1
Have I mentioned before that my goal for 2026 is to make my first quilt? And that is going to be a giant pizza for my cat to knead on?
^This is the planned layout for the appliqués. The sauce border between the crust and the cheese won in a landslide in last week's poll, and I agree it helps the thing read instantly as pizza. Plus shopping for fabric online means you can't trust the color on your monitor, and my "cheese" fabric turned out to be kind of hard to distinguish from the crust fabric when they were right next to each other, so the red sauce border helps differentiate the two.
I ended up cutting out 2"-wide bias tape from my red fabric, ironing down the seam allowance on one side, and then pinning it in this undulating pattern to the base cheese fabric, making sure to keep the raw edge of the bias tape within 4 inches of the edge, since that area will be covered by the crust fabric.
I sewed the folded edge down with a felling stitch. Then I took a seam gauge and thread marked 4" in along the entire circumference. That way, when I apply the crust of the pizza as a bias binding, I'll know for sure that it's an even thickness all the way around. (By the way, a commenter suggested doing a separate border with the crust fabric, then using a narrower binding from the same fabric. Which makes sense, since a 4" wide binding would be asking a lot of even bias cut fabric because the inner circumference is so much smaller than the outer. But I think I'm going to do the super wide binding anyway. I don't mind if the inner edge of the crust needs to be gathered down to fit, since that would make it look more realistic as a pizza crust anyway.)
So then I cut out and prepped all the pizza toppings. I used card stock to make templates to cut out the pepperonis, basil leaves, and mushrooms with a 1/2" seam allowance. For best results, I clipped my seam allowances and basted them down before ironing.
The olives I made from black cotton fabric scraps from past projects (chiefly the Elphaba shirtdress and the black part of my 1950s walkaway dress), cut into double folded bias tape and stuffed with polyester batting before stitching them closed into rings. The rest of the fabric is mostly from Michaels, the one exception being the cream and brown fabric I used for the mushrooms, which I got from a local quilting shop because Michaels didn't have anything that would work, and this print was absolutely perfect for giant mushrooms:
You can also tell that the red fabric I used for the sauce and pepperoni is a floral print, and the cheese fabric is actually a floral vine print. Since pizza looks splotchy and blotchy and nothing is uniformly colored, I purposely chose fabrics with a floral or marble/granite-like pattern.
Anyway, here's the pizza with the sauce border stitched down and all the toppings laid on top according to the planned layout. The end result is going to look like this but with a crust border and quilting lines. Notice my pizza is looking smaller than my kitchen table. I had pre-washed all of my fabrics, which caused the cheese and bottom crust fabric to shrink from 44" wide to about 42.5" wide, so I had to settle for a circle that was slightly smaller than planned. (And yes, I left the selvedges on because they're going to be covered by the crust binding anyway)
I basted the pieces down so that I wouldn't have to keep constantly pulling out my topping layout chart to figure out what goes where. ^This was kind of a happy accident, but because I used such haphazard basting stitches and often missed the edges with the seam allowances, the pepperonis started curling up at the edges the way real pepperoni curls when it's baked on a pizza. (Alas, I cannot keep them curled like this because those are raw edges that are being exposed, and this quilt is supposed to be resistant to damage from being used by the cat.)
Anyway, here I am, hand stitching all the appliqué toppings onto my giant pizza with matching thread to disguise my partially visible felling stitches and cursing Past Me for choosing to make this thing so big. I've just finished stitching down all the toppings along the outer circumference, so I guess next weekend will be for finishing the appliqués before we move on to cutting out the batting and making the quilting lines.
I'm doing all of this by hand, by the way, because my sewing machine broke a year ago and the local quilting store says they don't service those mini sewing machines because there is no way to get replacement parts. I'm pretty sure I know what's wrong with it though, so I just need to find time to take it apart and try to fix it myself. That said, even if I get the machine up and running, I would still probably quilt this by hand (again, old mini sewing machine that only has one stitch length, which is way too long to expect these stitches to survive being kneaded by kitty claws).
