Mario & Sonic Block Quilt

I love sewing, but haven't gotten into quilting until just recently. I wanted to do something fun and kind of silly for my first big quilt, so I decided to make a video game-themed comforter for my boyfriend for Christmas. I also liked this idea because the 8-bit images transferred quite nicely to a block quilt! 

I knew I wanted a Mario/Sonic theme, but I didn't know how to go about it, so I turned to the internet and found projects to work from.

-The front is made with plain Cotton Broadcloth.
-The batting is a compact, polyester batting.
-The backing is made with cotton fabric made specifically to be quilt backing (it's 108" wide, rather than 44" or 60")

Instruments I used:
-Sewing Machine
-Iron
-Ironing board (optional, but very useful)
-Seam ripper
-Lots and lots of pins
-Safety pins and a few pieces of tape
-#2 pencil
-Light colored pencils

First off, before doing anything, I had to design the quilt. I used Microsoft Excel to plan it out. It was much easier to play around with the design than it was with graphing paper, which is what I started out using.

After the design was made, I had to figure out how big I wanted the squares to be. This is a rather simple design and I wanted this to cover my boyfriend's queen-size bed, so I decided to make the finished squares measure 3.5" across. After I factored in the .5" seam allowance on both sides, I made a cardboard template 4" across with the corners of the inner 3.5" square poked out. 

This step involves lots and lots of pencil work! I traced every single individual square onto the fabrics. I'd say this was the monotonous step but since this quilt is rather big, most of the steps were pretty monotonous. I used a regular #2 pencil on the light fabrics and a yellow or orange colored pencil on the dark ones (because I couldn't find anything better).

Not only did I trace the outline, I also marked the corners where I would eventually be sewing. It was annoying to have to remember that detail, but I knew it would help me out later on.

Once I finished tracing the hundreds of squares, I set to work cutting them all out.

I didn't trust my ability to cut uniform 1/4" seam allowances; that's why I made sure to mark the corners of the fabric where I was going to sew. I was very careful and matched up the pencil marks on adjacent squares and pinned them so I could just sew from the top corner to the bottom corner and get a straight line.

This is when the seam-ripper comes in handy. The hardest part of this step is making sure you have the right strips pinned together--and not flipped the wrong way--before you sew. 

Before I sewed, though, I did iron the seams of the first row one direction, then the next row I ironed the other direction. I prefer ironing seams open, but all the quilting books I've read say to do this, so you never have to sew too many pieces of fabric at once.

This is when It all starts coming together. First, I stretched out the backing on the floor. In order to keep the wrinkles out of the quilt, I taped the corners tautly onto the wood floor itself. Then I gently laid the batting on top and carefully smoothed it out. After that I set the quilt top on and smoothed that out as well. Once I felt that they were all set as well as possible, I safety-pinned them all together around the edges. After assuring the layers were flat, I basted around the two faces. 

I decided to only quilt around the faces because I love using the sewing machine. I knew I wasn't going to be able to cram all of this into the machine, however, so I picked the simplest quilting pattern I could think of. Since I knew I wasn't going to quilt much, I tried to choose a batting that was bonded tightly so even after the blanket was washed, the batting wouldn't bunch up.

I tried to pick a simple way to finish the quilt. Originally, I wanted the backing to be folded onto the front of the quilt, leaving a nice, black border around the top of the comforter. Unfortunately, I ended up not getting enough backing to do that; it was just a little bit smaller than the top!

Instead, I trimmed the batting so that it was pretty even with the backing. Then I turned all three layers over onto the back side of the quilt. I turned the top under all those layers so all the edges are hidden, and then I sewed over all four sides. I used black thread so the comforter had a thin, black, inner border right near the edge.

The finished project was about 60" wide and 95" long. I was afraid it wouldn't fit his bed, but once i threw it on there, it seemed okay. Not all the squares lined up perfectly, and up close you can tell I'm new to this, but overall, I think it turned out well. I'm pretty gosh darn proud of it!