Thursday, June 25, 2015

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.




Thursday, June 18, 2015

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!