Dragon Quilt Panels from the Late 2000’s (In Honor of the 2024 Year of the Dragon)

Hi everyone! The Chinese New Year is this Saturday. This year will be the year of the dragon. I was born in the year of the dragon. I usually don’t celebrate Chinese New Year (Especially because I’m not Chinese), but since this is the year with the same animal I was born in, I wanted to celebrate this new year!

I don’t have many dragon inspired things to talk about on this blog, but I recently found something I thought would make for a great post! Many years ago, (AKA the 2000’s) I decided to purchase a collection of fabric panels and wanted to make a quilt. I never did and the panels have sat in my house ever since. While cleaning out my things, I rediscovered them and decided to take photos of some of them for this post!

Here are all the panels laid out together…

There are ten panels in the collection. The images were printed on iron on transfers. They were then ironed onto pieces of fabric, creating the panels.

Here is a closeup of some of the panels and the images on them…

The images are of dragons, but they are fantasy inspired. Back in the 2000’s, I found some of these images online. When I discovered someone took the images and made quilt panels out of them, I decided to purchase them.

It was one of my youthful fabric and sewing impulse purchases that I feel conflicted about. I’m not a huge dragon lover (Except during the year of the dragon) but I love the images on these panels. I was happy and excited to purchase them, but when I received them I began to worry about the panels’ longevity and durability. Also, I was worried about the fabric quality (As you can see, the fabric is pretty thin and feels like 2000’s broadcloth) and how to actually make a quilt using these panels. Since I was so conflicted about the panels, I decided to not bother with using them for anything until I figured out what to do. Over ten years later, I still haven’t figured out what to do!

Right now, I decided to not bother using them yet. I still have a lot of cleaning and organizing to do, so I don’t want to used them until I know if I need to buy more fabric or not.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!