It's Done, It's Done, It's Done!

I finally finished my Super Mario Quilt! I've been working on this quilt sine November 2011 - so about 9 months now. I don't think my husband really ever thought I would get it done and I'll admit, I even had my doubts! It was such a colossal project! I can't believe it's done!

Here are some fun facts for you: This quilt has 6,144 tiny little 1 inch squares in it. Each character has some blue borders around them and the whole thing is framed with a black border and white binding. It weighs a ton with all of those little seams inside of it! I'll have to find out exactly how much one of these days. It is also the biggest quilt I've ever made - about 72 x 105. I had to take it to the basketball court in the park next to us to get a place where I could spread it out for a picture. It is quite large!

I spent a lot of time on this quilt. It took me 3 nights worth of time cutting out all of those little squares - probably about 10 hours total. Then it took me about 5 hours to sew each character together, so about 120 hours for that. Then add in another 5 hours getting the borders around each character, then an hour sewing all the characters together, and another 30 minutes for the outer border. (This is really adding up!) It took 2.5 hours to pin baste it all. What really surprised me was how long it took to quilt the whole top! I thought it would take me maybe one evening - ha! I was way off! I spent about 20 hours just stitching in the ditch around each character and for the details inside their designs, and another 5 hours stippling in the blue background (so 25 hours there). A lot of that time was spent fighting with moving the quilt through the machine since it was so heavy. Then, another 6 hours to sew the binding on and finish hand stitching that to the back. So, what does that get me? Roughly 169 hours of time on this quilt or 21.125 work days or $2,535 in wages. Haha - so this quilt is worth a lot in labor and probably about $200 in materials when all is said and done. :) Just some fun facts for you.

So, I hope you've enjoyed seeing my journey in completing this quilt. It has been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. My husband is very happy that he finally gets to use it now, and I'm happy that I can finally show it off! I'm sure this quilt will be a hit for several get togethers we have at our place. I already know it's a hit with the cats! :)

And, now for the winner of my Red, White & Blue giveaway...

Post #80, which was Scrapbook-ChickADoodle. I'll be contacting you by email to send off your package! Thanks to everyone who commented, and I hope you keep coming back to my blog for inspiration and creative projects even if I don't have something to give away.

Happy crafting everyone!

Oops!

Yesterday I spent all day working on the Super Mario quilt again. I think I need between 12-15 more hours to have the whole thing completely done! That is so exciting considering it's been a WiP for about 9 months!

Here's a pic my lovely husband took of me while I was wresting with shifting the quilt. Sorry my eyes look possessed and it's so blurry, but I'm quilting in action with no time to stop for the camera! Stitching in the ditch around all of my characters took a really, really long time. The "Angry Sun" took the longest since it has the most outlying parts. I think I spent an hour just on that one alone. With the quilt being so heavy, it is really hard to move it easily. I've definitely put my little Janome to the test with this quilt!

The fun thing yesterday was that I also started stippling in the blue background part of the quilt. I've never really stippled before, but it is so much fun and I love it! I did some practice squares at the quilt retreat I went to earlier this year, but my stippling wasn't very good. I did some more practice yesterday, and liked what I was doing, so I braved it and went all out on the quilt. I am soooo happy with how it is turning out. I've got about 1/2 of the top stippled and it will probably take another 2 hours to finish the rest. From there it's smooth sailing to the end (I hope)!

Unfortunately, I ran into a little snag yesterday... Just as I was nearing quitting time for the night my left pointer finger got nabbed by the needle! (I've never done that before, so I guess I can cross that life experience off the list!) I was fortunate that it didn't go through the bone and just went through the tip of the finger. It did go through the finger nail, which was not pleasant, but I'll survive. I even got my husband to help me put on a band aid. :) Want to know the best part? I had to go right back to quilting because I wasn't in a good place to stop yet! After checking to make sure I hadn't bled all over the quilt, (phew!) I had about 5 more minutes of stippling before I could call it quits. My finger was howling the whole time, but it's doing better. It's just a little sore now, but I guess this is going to make practicing for my violin lesson on Tuesday a little harder... Oops!

Happy crafting!

Mario Characters Finished!

So, this is just going to be a picture heavy post. I've got all of the characters done for my Super Mario quilt, so now I'm just going to show them off! Hopefully I'll figure out how I'm doing the sashing this week. They aren't quite all the same size, so it will be interesting. :) Anyway, happy crafting!!

 Cheep Cheep

Buster Beetle

Bullet Bill

Angry Sun

 Buster Beetle

Chest

 Coin

Bob-omb

Fire Flower

Ghost Boo

 Goomba's Shoe

Goomba

Luigi

Shy Guy

Lakitu Bro

Question Mark Block

 Koopa Troopa

Mario

 Thwomp

Mushroom

Piranha Plant

Spiny Shell

Squid

Starman

Super Mario Quilt Update

Wow, it has been much too long since my last post! We've been super busy here with work, regular life in general, and vacation. We just got back from a weekend trip to Tennessee where we went to the Bonnaroo music festival. We had a fantastic time, but it means that I haven't had any time to really sew since Memorial Day weekend.

I know my goal was to get all of my characters finished, but of course I was sidetracked. We spent some time on the UW-Madison campus that weekend just enjoying life. And, I've gotta say, it was really nice to just relax and not be focused on a deadline. So - my sewing took a break.

But - I'm back at it now! I was able to get 4 characters about 1/2 way done over Memorial Day weekend. I had the squares sewn together into strips - which is the most time consuming part. So, last night I spent time getting all of the strips all nice and pretty so they're easier to sew together into the block.

Want to know what makes this step soooooo tedious? Ironing! It takes probably about 30 minutes if I'm really focused to iron all of the strips together and then I still have to clip off the thread strings. In order to sew them all together nicely and have the corners match up, I have to iron the seams in opposite directions for each strip.

While I'm ironing, I take the little bit of extra time to lay out the whole block in ironed out strip so I can double check that everything is sewn together correctly. I have had a couple of strips that have had one too many squares just from things getting stuck together. All-in-all I haven't had too many mistakes like that so my seam ripper has stayed tucked into the drawer on my sewing machine! Yay! :) Laying out the strips also gets me to check that the character is facing the right way. If it's not, then I just flip all of the strips over and voila! - it's a mirror image of itself.


The next step is to get all of these strips sewn into the completed blocks. Once these 4 are done then I only have 3 left to do! Hopefully this weekend I'll make some more progress, but with Father's Day and my father-in-law's birthday I probably won't get everything done... We'll see! Happy crafting!

Happy Memorial Day!

I'd like to take a moment to say thank you to all of our troops and service men and women who have given their time, talents, and in some cases their lives to keep this country a safe place for me and my family to live peacefully. In truth, they are the ones that give me the freedom to craft and quilt and create to my heart's desire, so I could not do any of this without the security they provide us all. So, thank you.

Since their sacrifice also gives me an extra day off work I am putting my time to good use and have a goal of finishing the rest of the Super Mario Quilt characters. I have 7 more to do, which means approximately 35 hours of sewing this weekend, plus ironing time, plus blogging time - probably about 40ish hours in the craft room. I'm also going wedding dress shopping with my friend Heidi this afternoon and going to a 2nd birthday party for my husband's cousin's kid - is that a second cousin? cousin once removed? second cousin once removed? Any way you look at it, it's a family birthday party and it has a Dora the Explorer theme, so there will be lots of tasty Mexican food! We're looking forward to it, and I'm looking forward to meeting my goal! Stay tuned for pictures of success or failure either way! :)

Characters I have left to make:
Koopa Troopa (turtle guy)
Laikitu Bro (green and yellow guy looking over the cloud)
Goomba's Shoe (green sock thing)
Goomba (brown and white guy)
Spiny Shell (orange and red spiky turtle shell guy)
Buzzy Beetle (black and brown shell guy toward the bottom left)
Buster Beetle - this one is not represented on the grid since we switched it for the plain green shell

Happy crafting!

Super Mario Quilt Top 1/2 Done!

Well... I would have gotten it over half way done, but I got distracted by this bright, shiny, new sewing machine! My husband bought me an early birthday present of a new Janome HD1000 sewing machine and I'm in love with it! I played around with the tension and dropping the feed dogs (something I've never been able to do on a machine before) for a couple hours and then got to sewing the Shy Guy character square.

Unfortunately the Shy Guy is still only 1/2 done, but I'll be able to finish it up this weekend. Otherwise, I've got 12 full character squares out of 24 completed! It's been very slow going, but now that I have my new machine I'm going to be sewing non-stop! I can't believe how smooth it runs! And, having the new machine is going to give me some accountability to keep sewing and get this quilt finished just in time for hot summer weather. :) (Maybe we'll have to blast the A/C to use it!!) Anyway, happy Friday and happy crafting!

Sneak Peak...

So, I promised my husband that I'd be working on his Super Mario Quilt while he's gone this week. So far I haven't had a chance to do too much, but I have laid out the Shy Guy square and that should be sewn together for an updated post by Friday for all of the characters that I've put together. So, just a quick update here today to say that I have made at least some progress!! (Plus, I should be getting my new sewing machine in the mail today, so of course I'll be glued to it for the next few days!) Sorry that the photo doesn't have quite the whole character square shown. I had already started gathering up the bottom rows when I thought "I should take a picture!" :) Happy crafting!

Super Mario Quilt #5

I know, I know, I've been slacking on posts for this quilt. Well, that's because I hadn't made much progress on it until the last few days. I now have 9 character squares put together out of 24, so just barely over 1/3 of the way done with those. I'd say that is a very big accomplishment since each square takes between 5-6 hours to complete, so that's between 45-54 hours spent on making this quilt already!

I thought I would give a little step-by-step on how I put everything together for a character square and then show you all of the ones that I have complete. So, here goes!


1) Lay out the squares into the character pattern and then gather them into a stack for each row to sew.


2) Sew each row together, one square at a time.

3) Iron out the rows. I press the seams in an alternating pattern, so the first strip I'll press the seams down to the right and for the second I'll press the seams down the to left, then the next down to the right, then down to the left, so on and so forth until all the seams are pressed. I also trim off all of the thread tails at this point so they aren't poking through

                                                          all over the place.

4) Sew the rows together. I pin each seam together so that all the corners line up nicely. This is when that alternating ironing pattern pays off because the seams go together so much easier!

5) Iron out the entire square and you're done!

Now, as promised, here's the picture of all of the squares I have completed so far (fyi, the bed in the picture is a queen-size bed):

Happy Crafting! :)