Joe Cool

Reading Peanuts was a staple in my life.   As a child my brothers and I owned many dozen of the Peanuts paperback books and spent hours reading and rereading them.   In the last year I began to start collecting books from the Complete Peanuts set and have been reading them.  It's pretty amazing how many of the strips I had read as a child- especially since the bulk of the strips were written before I was born.   I also have a sneaking suspicion that my sense of humor was greatly influenced by reading the strips.
 Over the past two years I've created many video game pixel quilts and it started me thinking about what else is already quite pixelated that could be turned into a quilt and Peanuts came to mind.     I sat down one night and began to mess around in my photoshop program and began to feel as though I were eight years old again and playing around in paint!   After some fiddling I figured out what I needed to do and inspiration for a new series of quilts was born.
Thus far I have finished two quilts and have the patterns written for two more.  There are so many ideas I have for Peanuts quilts that I have a feeling only a small portion of them will ever come to fruition.  Ah well.
I decided the first quilt in the series to make would be Joe Cool.   Partly for the fact that, hey, it's Joe Cool and also partly because I've been wanting to make my brother a quilt and his name is also Joe.   I recall that as a teen he had a Joe Cool shirt and he tended to wear it with some pride.   Who wouldn't?  Joe Cool is, after all, well... cool!
After creating so many large quilts recently it was pleasant to work on a lap sized quilt.  The finished size is 45x57.   For the background quilting I stitched paw prints.  I give myself a D- (just don't call me Peppermint Patty, please!) for them.  They're tricky little buggers!     Isn't that snuggle bubble just gorgeous?   Instead of working with 57" long strips I broke the background into large chunks.  Doing so saved so much time (and thread and fabric) and it also makes the Snoopy print stand out much better.  Of course though after sewing a gazillion 1.5" black and blue squares together I went, "Duh! Why did I not sew two 1.5x X strips together and then cut them to size?  It would have saved so much time!"  Ah well, I have another Peanuts pattern that switches between two colors pretty frequently so that pattern I amended to do this technique.  Live and learn, you blockhead.