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.
