Sneak Peek

Alright ladies and gentlemen (who am I kidding, it's just ladies!). I know you've all been chomping at the bit to get a glimpse of the secret project. Well, here it is. I'd say it's about 1/3 done as I have roughly 2500 squares pieced. My original estimate was 10,000 pixels but I cut off a substantial amount of the original picture to make it more manageable. Final will be closer to 7,000 pixels but it will still be plenty large. Note that the finished size of each pixel is about 1" square and you can understand what a big project this is. Would love to hear your guesses as to what you think it is!

Busiest time of the year

So I know that in many houses, Christmas is the busiest time of the year. Or maybe it's back to school. In my house, it's halloween. Eric LOVES Halloween. We've (mostly him) have done some amazing costumes over the years. Depending on what's going on, we usually do something for my niece and nephew as well as for ourselves.

Here are a few of the things we've made:

This was Liv's costume last year - was supposed to be a cupcake but really didn't turn out as we'd hoped.

Payt's angry bird last year. This one was cool and easier than I'd expected.

Costumes 2010. Payt is Toad from Mario and Liv is Princess Peach (aka misc princess). We didn't build anything for her costume.

Me as Hulk Hogan a few years ago.

The final one I have a picture of is the best one. Eric and his brother made this Iron Man costume in 2010. They took it to a bunch of costume contests and of course won everything. It's amazing (it's missing a couple of pieces in this pic).

You will have to wait a few weeks before I tell you what I'm doing for this year's costumes. I will, however, tell you that I wanted to do a monster like this but my niece would rather be a vampire (weirdo).

Back from vacation!

Just thought my 3 readers would like an update on what's been happening over at CCQ headquarters. I was on vacation for 2 weeks. The first week, Eric and I went to Boston for some shopping and baseball watching (Jays won!). The second week Eric had to go back to work so the dogs and I did some cleaning but also got some sewing done. The quilt I am working on is taking longer than I expected as usual. I may even take a break to work on a quick satisfaction quilt. Here's a photo of all the blocks I need to piece so you can understand the magnitude. Each pile is roughly 4 inches tall. It will make a picture when it's complete.

To tide you over until I have something more interesting to show, here's a pic of Jack and Darwin in the bathtub playing. They went in all on their own for no reason.

Stash Update

So there were a couple of things I "had" to buy online for my latest project. In order to make the shipping cost efficient, I added a couple of fabrics to the orders. Here's what I got:

 This first item is a must have for quilters who buy fabric online. The complete Kona Color Card by Robert Kaufman fabrics allows you to better choose your colors so that you aren't constantly looking at them onscreen trying to figure out what works together. Very happy to finally have one.

These next two fabrics were just really cute and I couldn't not get them:

Rally by Dan Stiles

Bespoken Fancy Buttons

Finally, I'm going to have to find something awesome to do with this fabric by Tula Pink. There are a bunch of co-ordinating fabrics (and 3 colorways) but I knew E was already going to give me that "don't you have enough fabrics" face so I only bought this main one.

Nightshade by Tula Pink

Hoping to have a sneak peak at the new quilt for you soon. TV fans should be getting very excited about this one.

One finished and one started

Damn, it's been a month since I posted! How'd that happen? I'll have to blame this lovely weather but really I'm just lazy. I wanted to show you how the City Green revisted quilt turned out. I still seem to be having issues cutting the blocks all the same size but this one is much better than the first. In the end, I still did the rows offset because although most of them lined up, they didn't all.

Here's the final product. I'm happy with it but it's a bit too small for use as a sleeping quilt so the damn cats have claimed it for now. I think it'll be fine for a couch quilt in the winter. I'm thinking that I would like to buy a fabric cutter such as the Go!baby sometime soon so that I can avoid my current issues of terrible cutting.

Here's a look at how the quilting is done. Kind of an echo just inside the sashing. It makes it look like the sashing is actually over the squares which I like.

Now for a sneak of my next quilt. This one is going to take awhile but I'm very excited about it. It's a pixel quilt!! YAY! The content is kind of a secret but I can assure you that it's going to be awesome. I have already cut about a million squares and have a million more to go.


Two of my ten colors. The squares are 1.5"x1.5" which means they'll be 1" square when sewn.




This is a trial to see how the process would go. I found a tutorial by Oh! Fransson (link to left) that should make it easier. I'm thinking that it will also make my cutting issues less noticeable.

 That's all for now. I will try to document the process while I'm going.

Pixel Quilts 2

I had too many of these to share last time so here are some more. It seems like a large portion of the quilts out there are mario focused but there are lots of others too. Enjoy! 




Another pattern from Carolina Patchworks

I loved Dr Mario when I was a kid.

Done by Oh Fransson which is linked on the right

Ok, so I've been thinking too much about this for the last few days and I think I'm going to try to do one. So here's the question, do you think I should do Frog Mario or Tanooki? They will be similar ideas to the ones below. Let me know what you think.



Pixel Quilts

For a while now I've been eying quilts that I will call Pixel Quilts. Most of them take old nintendo game characters and transform them into quilt form. This is done fairly easily with the 8-bit characters from our childhood since they are already pixel-y. Essentially what you do is cut out a bunch of colored squares and sew them together to make something cool. Each square is a pixel. It will probably be some time before I try one of these since I'm still not good at the exact patterns (see last post). Update on that one: not going as planned.

I just wanted to share a few of my favs. Apologies that I haven't figured out how to give credit for everyone's pics - I am not claiming these to be my own, don't worry (we all know I can't quilt like that).

















This last one is a pattern by Carolina Patchworks (link to the right) who has all kinds of pixel quilt patterns including Donkey Kong and Mario. She also has a book coming out in September called "Pixel Play" which is entirely pixel quilts!! Can't wait!