Skull Quilt - A Halloween Quilt as a Christmas Gift

Yes, I know it is unusual to give someone a Halloween quilt as a Christmas gift, but I could not have done better with creating a gift fitting for its recipient. For a while now, my daughter has wanted me to make a quilt for my son-in-law. And I wanted to make him one, but our tastes are very different so it took me a while to channel his desires into a quilt.

I like all the colors, bright and bold. He likes neutrals. His favorite holiday is Halloween. My least favorite holiday is Halloween. Somewhere along the way, I decided to investigate a skull quilt. I think I was inspired by some of the brightly colored skulls from Day of the Dead celebrations.


The resulting quilt is a very close replica of this picture I saw on Pinterest. The picture did not link back to a specific source so I am not able to give full and proper credit.

Most of my quilts are created from stash, but this one required a more limited, neutral set of fabrics, and fortunately a little bit of online shopping landed just the right combination for this quilt.

It was fun to piece and fun to quilt. Using the inspiration photo as a guide, it became much like assembling a mosaic.

The eyes, nose, and mouth are heavily quilting in hopes they would recede into the bones of the skull. The spirally eyes were especially fun to quilt.

The pebble quilting that surrounds the skull is one of my favorite ways to quilt.

Finally, I wanted to personalize the quilt so instead of a traditional label, I quilted Zack's name and the year right into the border surrounding the skull. We got together with Zack and family a couple of weeks before Christmas as they will be travelling to see his family on Christmas day.

The backing is made from the leftover fabric.

This guy makes a big quilt at 82 x 88 inches. I loved being pushed out of my comfort zone to create this quilt for my favorite (and only, ha!) son-in-law.