Baby Yoshi

About a year ago I saw an awesome Yoshi blanket on Quiltoni's blog.    I made the mental note to remember it as it would make a perfect baby quilt.  
Normally I use pre-existing sprites when I make video game quilts, but Quiltoni had actually written this pattern herself. Talented, eh?     So I sat down and looked at her finished quilt and in a grid drew the pattern in paint.net.   Once finished I plugged the pattern into the software my husband wrote for me and viola!  I had all the measurements and amount of fabric to purchase.
I've wanted to make a quilt using mostly Batik's and decided that this quilt was the perfect quilt to do so.    I'm very glad that I made this decision as the colors all came together so well!   Yoshi is so cute!
I wanted to give the quilt a bit more of a tropical feel so I taught myself how to do a free-motion feather stitch.   It took a while to get it to be somewhat consistent, but the effort paid off!
  For the backing snuggle bubble fabric was used making Yoshi even more cuddly!   Now not to wear out the blanket before the baby comes!

Mario and Zelda Coasters

Perler beads are so much fun and there are so many different things that one can create with them.  
I'd seen images of Mario and Zelda coaster sets and had to sit down to make some.   At the bottom of the post I included a few of the patterns that I created when making the coasters.
The perler beads are usually purchased at JoAnn fabrics with 50% or 60% coupons.   The beads are cheaper at Michael's, but Michael's doesn't allow more than one coupon a day and the Michael's that I haunt doesn't have very many colors.   Thankfully JoAnn's has tons of perler bead colors.
For the corkboard that I attach to the bottom of the coasters I went to Hobby Lobby and purchased a roll adhesive cork.    I purchased the roll that is a foot wide as I can get three backings for each four inch cut.
The finished size of the coasters is roughly 4x4 inches and is a 20x20 perler bead square.

Bowser

I recently finished a 72x86 pixeled Bowser quilt.    All-in-all I'm happy with how it turned out, though I think that it would have been better had the black and orange fabric had less of a pattern.    I do love the background fabric though... it's so Bowser!  
I also decided to fill in the empty top-right corner with a bit of applique.   I hate applique but want to learn how to do it so I need to start somewhere!  I'm getting better at it, but still need to work on it- just like I need to work on getting my backs to lie flat.   I seem to be good at getting a few bunches in the back.
The fabric on the back is a bed sheet.  I'm a bargain shopper and always have to check out the clearance aisle and to my delight I found Mario sheet sets discounted.  How awesome is that?
Once again I used the program that my husband wrote for me to calculate the amount of yardage needed for the quilt.   It so beats doing it by hand, or rather head!
For the applique letters I used Mario Bros. font that I download.   I printed out the letters on a piece of paper and then used them as a pattern to cut the fabric and heat 'n' bond.

8-bit Paintings

Another geekery craft that I love to do- especially if I need a break from quilting- is pixel painting. I've always wished I could paint as it looks so fun but I'm not that great of a drawer. Creating pixel paintings has been a lot of fun for me as it makes me feel as though I can paint... and I probably really can't paint that well. I just paint and call it good. I'm sure someone who knew what they were doing would see lots of errors, but that's okay. This is for fun!
The first painting I wanted to give a whirl was Mario in the sock as Mario is so cute in it! The only thing cuter than Mario in a sock is Tanuki Mario.
I created this Zelda scene to go with the Zelda quilt that I made for my brother.

Kirby is one of my favorite Nintendo characters. He's so cute too and a lot of fun when playing Smash Bros.

Quilting- another passion

Creating cards isn't the only craft I do... pretty much if it's a craft that interests me I'll give it a whirl and some crafts become addicting and others just don't catch.
One craft that has become addicting is quilting and then I took it to another level and began to make video game quilts.
The first video game quilt I constructed was a queen sized Legend of Zelda quilt.
   It was exceedingly time consuming to make, not only with the construction but also with creating the pattern.  Thankfully since then my wonderful husband wrote me a quilting program that will take an image and give me the amount of fabric I need to purchase.   This program saves me soooo much time- and frustration!
I generally construct the video game quilts using 1 1/2 inch blocks or strips.   I really don't have the patience to make a video game quilt one block at a time so if the color in a row is the same for seven pixels then I use a 7 1/2 x 1 1/2 inch strip.
Since Zelda I've created a Sonic baby quilt, a two-sided Kirby quilt, and a Mario quilt.  
I loved making the Sonic quilt.  I think I had the top thrown together in one day! How awesome is that?  It definitely makes me want to make more baby quilts and fewer bed-sized quilts. ~laughs~
The Mario quilt is the first video game quilt that I used the program my husband wrote for me.   That program is an amazing time saver and the accuracy for the amount of yardage needed is spot on... which I guess is why people love math.   The answer is always constant... unless you're me and then the answers always vary.     The entire quilt probably took about sixty hours worth of work.    I enjoyed it, but I was very happy to have the last block finished.   Because of the amount of time it took to assemble the blocks I kept the quilting very simply.  For the characters I sewed up and down to help give the characters a more pixelated look.  I also did this as it helps distract from the fact that I assemble the squares with strips and not 1 1/2 blocks.    For the background I did a simple stipple.    

Geekery doesn't stop with video game quilts.  I've also designed a Tardis quilt.    My sister-in-law asked my if I thought I could make a Tardis quilt for her daughter's sixteenth birthday.   I said yes and then went, "Wow.  This just might have been the dumbest thing I agreed to.   I have to create a pattern for this... this could be bad."
I did a lot of googling and found a few Tardis quilts that I like different aspects of and then incorporated those aspects into my pattern.  
It actually ended up not being as difficult as I thought it would be and I've made two Tardis quilts since then!