Okay, I swear, last Tetris quilt post! I realized that I never posted the completely finished quilted and bound picture:
A few close ups of the quilting. I went with a basic curve to mimic the dropping pieces.
SpriteStitch was kind enough to feature me on their blog.
The quilt is already in Tucson (where the recipient is). I’m delivering it to her next week when I’ll be in town for Thanksgiving. I’m so excited!
And without further ado … drumroll… here is the finished center of the Tetris quilt!
Please forgive the mess… when I’m in a big quilting project, I tend to forget to clean and other unimportant things like that.
Next, I’m going to border it in white which will better show the game board and why it says “shit happens” and why the rows aren’t disappearing (since with everything else going on, it takes a minute to get it). Then there will be a final black border. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do the binding in, but have a week for that.
I’m in the home stretch now!
Continuing from Tuesday’s post… at that point, I had cut out all of the letters with the fusible web on the back. Up next is to position them on the quilt and then iron them. And once they are ironed, they can’t be moved, so it’s definitely important to make sure you like where they are. Originally I wasn’t planning on having the “P” offset, but I bumped the quilt, and I liked how it looked, so I left it there.
After the letters are ironed, I go around the edges and blanket stitch them. If you don’t do that, they’re more likely to fray and corners might come up and you may not want to machine wash the quilt, so for me it’s worth the time to stitch the edges so that I know the letters will stay on there. And of course the threads get trimmed so the letters look nicer.
From the back:
Once I blanket stitched all of the letters, I trim up the piece to size (I do a bigger background piece than I need since the heavy stitching can distort the piece a little). And here it is with the rest of the top section. Below the “ENS”, you can see a little of the distortion (the piece no longer sits perfectly flat) but once it’s sewn to the bottom section, it won’t be an issue.
At GeekGirlCon last week, I fell in love with this picture from Katie Clark Art. Every time I walk by this picture in my living room, I start giggling. When I spoke with Katie, she was saying that she didn’t think the Shy Guys would play Tetris correctly.
Well, I happened to have a Tetris quilt board just about finished and I have enough yoshi plushies to start a small army, so it seemed appropriate to recreate this picture. So here’s what I came up with.
Moving onto the top of the Tetris quilt, it’s going to say “shit happens”. To do this, I’m going to cut out the letters with fusible web and glue/sew them onto the black background.
To start with, I get fusible web (meaning both sides are meltable glue) and section it off into 4″ squares, so my letters will be consistent.
Each square is cut out and then each letter is drawn into the square. The important thing here is for each letter to be the mirror of itself. The fusible will be on the back of the letter, so it and the sketch, need to be reversed. I also want to keep each leg and such of the letter as uniform as possible.
Once the 11 letters are made, then I put these onto the white (letter) fabric and lightly iron it to stick the fusible onto the wrong side of the fabric. The layout and orientation of the letters doesn’t matter here, but sorry to any OCD people.
Once the fabric cools, I cut out each letter and, voila, I have letters ready to fuse. Next, I will lay them out on the black background piece, peel of the backs, and iron, and later stitch, them down.
Last Friday night I got the last sections of the Tetris board assembled! There are 180 blocks. This section is approximately 48″ x 60″. This took me about 4 weeks of house arrest to complete. The only breaks (besides work and sleep) were a wedding in CA and GeekGirlCon (ya know, the important things).
Up next is the lettering for the “shit happens” for the top section. Right now, I have all of the letters cut out. I’ll do another post and go into more details about the process for the appliques.
Deadline of next Saturday is closing in!
It’s been awhile! For the last 3+ weeks I have been furiously sewing blocks and staying home most nights and weekends. For each round of sewing for each color, it took me about 2 hours… yeesh. But finally, on Monday, I finally got the last of the blocks assembled. Here are half of the blocks by color.
The yellow pile was a little short because when I went to press them, I realized that I sewed 8 of the 10 blocks wrong. And though that does make a cool block, it’s not what I’m going for here. So I had to seam rip and resew them.
Once the blocks were all sewn correctly and pressed, I laid them out. I’m ecstatic about how these are looking. I’ve shown the picture to some friends who haven’t believed me that it’s only flat fabric.
Up next is to sew the blocks together. There are 180 blocks. On Tuesday, I got them sewed into pairs, so now I’m down to 90. I’m optimistic about meeting my deadline of October 25, if I continue to work on this with every spare moment at home. After the bottom is sewn, next will be working on the applique letters for the top half.
Well… 14 hours later… I have all 752 HST (half square triangle) squared up. Each color way took about 2 hours. This step is important because when I sew the squares, they don’t all end up the same size. Some of the squares only need 1/16 – 1/8″ trimmed off. Others lost about 1/4″. But now they are all 1.5″ and will fit with the rest of the pieces. Huzzah!
I’m going to start sewing the blue blocks together. Quick reminder what the block will look like:
And here’s what the blues look like laid out.
27 days and counting until this needs to be at the quilter’s…
It’s been awhile since I’ve done an update! My life has been consumed with making HST (half square triangles) for the Tetris quilt. A HST is made up of two 45 degree right triangles:
A few posts ago, I put up the block design, which is a square with 4 trapezoids. The actual assembly of the block has quite a few more pieces, to make it easy to assemble. So it’s actually 1 square, 4 rectangles, and 4 HSTs. And the quilt has 188 blocks (47 Tetris shapes times 4 blocks per shape) = 752 HSTs. Oh, and the finished block is 4″, so each HST is only 1″.
is actually made like this
The typical way to make HST is to make them 2 at a time. However, there is a really cool method to make 8 at a time. You start with a large square (“large” being relative in this case, since it was only 4″). Then you sew 1/4″ on either side of both diagonals, like this.
Once you do that, you cut the square into quarters, using the line intersections as a guide.
Then you cut each piece along the diagonal
Lastly, you press them open (this one hasn’t been pressed yet). And since I want all of my seams to nest, which fabric gets pressed which direction is important.
I spent a few afternoons doing the sewing/cutting, then spent the last 2 evenings pressing the HSTs open. It took me five and a half 40 minute television episodes 😀
Up next… all 752 HSTs need to be squared up to 1.5″………
Well, not much to update on the Tetris quilt. I went through my Big Box o’ Fabrics to select the block fabrics. There are 7 colors of blocks. Within each block, there are 5 fabrics. The fabrics range from dark to light and are placed in specific spots to give the 3D effect. The top fabric is the lightest. The bottom is the darkest.
I need a total of 35 fabrics for the blocks. Going through my stash, I had 32 of the 35. A quick trip to JoAnns got me the remaining 3. I decided to use pinks instead of greys, which was the 7th color in the original quilt.
Next up: cutting the fabric. From each of the 4 trapezoidal colors (AKA not the center square), I need 38 cuts. From the center fabric, I need 28. This equals 180 cuts per color family. There will be additional cutting later since I’m using some techniques to get 8 pieces out of one square of fabric, so the 180 cuts is actually the efficient/shortened way of doing the cutting! I calculated that there will be approximately 2450 pieces in this quilt. It didn’t seem as high when I designed it 🙂
So far, I have cut up purple, green, and orange. It took me about an hour per color.
