2025 Milwaukee Brewers Home Run Quilt (in progress)

Now that I’ve actually finished a long-term, unfinishable project, it’s time to start a new one. I’ve been noodling the idea of documenting every Milwaukee Brewers home run for a season in a quilt. I’m partially inspired by the “temperature” quilts/blanket fad that started with the knitters and spilled over into the quilters a few years ago. I like the idea of representing data in patchwork, and I love starting a project without knowing what the completed piece will look like, but I don’t actually care about daily temperatures.

I care about baseball.

After a couple of years of thought (my original sketches started with Mike Moustakas, who left the team in 2019), I realized I was never going to get started if I tried to put too much information into each patch. So, here is what you see in each block:

1. The batter. Each player has their own fabric, and this fabric will be used throughout the season.
2. The opponent. Each opposing team has two fabrics, one for home and for away, and these are chosen to represent a team’s colors or uniforms.
3. The number of runs scored. Each run gets a stripe in the block.
4. Walk-offs will be noted in the quilting/embellishments.

I did a little math with last year’s stats (177 home runs by fifteen different players, including ten salamis) and decided on a 2.5″ finished block.

March/April

Bear for scale. The blocks will be trimmed before they are stitched together in rows–the number of rows will be decided in October.

You can see William Contreras finally getting hot on the road trip:

Further updates every three weeks or so!

Mid-May update

I’ve run out of Jake Bauers fabric, and Vinny Capra has been designated for assignment, so I might have to switch them around and redo a few.

Not a lot of production out of the Crew; I should have made the blocks bigger.

End of May update

I found more Jake Bauers fabric while looking for something else.

You don’t really realize how many teams use red or orange (or both) until you start pawing through your stash looking for something appropriate…

Another End of May Update

I don’t know what day it is anymore. Joey Ortiz gets into the lineup with a little yellow to break up the darks.

It is slowly starting to dawn on me how ugly the finished project is going to be. Maybe it needs some green sashing.

I’ll get to Yeli’s first career walk-off in the next batch. I still haven’t decided how to mark a walk-off…

mid-August Update

The finished project is going to be SO UGLY! Lol.

The key to completing this project successfully is organization, so I’ve stopped working in chronological order. Do you know how long it’s going to take to do “At Washington“?!

I wish I’d picked a bluer fabric for Isaac Collins. It’s one of my favorite florals, but it’s not quite the right shade.

One of the many amazing things about this team is how they can roll up ten runs in a game without a single HR.

The Marlins fabric is awful because their unis were awful. (I think I bought the “away” fabric in Kokomo in 1997 for about fifty cents.)

Yet Another August Update

I was super-motivated this week, and craving burgers for some reason (this is the best commercial tie-in anywhere in baseball).

The colors are off in some photos, because 1) I’m working in the dark due to heatwave, and 2) the phone software hallucinates when you take a picture that doesn’t contain the whole color spectrum. Makes taking pics of quilt stuff and flowers harder than it used to be…

I haven’t done the ones from the June series at the Cubs because I want to make sure I have enough fabric for the five-game series coming up next week. 🙂

This went faster than I thought it would, with only solos and two-runs:

I might have to re-do Joey’s Slam, if there’s not enough yellow showing after I trim it to size: