Mario brothers blanket

For Christmas, I made my awesome, game loving husband a quilt. It took me almost three months, but his Mario blanket got finished! Here's just a few pictures of the process.

The most exhausting part of this quilt was cutting all of the squares. It was 15x20 squares, so that's 300 little squares. I've never attempted a quilt before, so starting out, my first thought was that I could cut everything like they did "back in the day". After about 10 squares, I gave in and bought a roller cutter. Things improved quickly!!

I took these pictures of the fabric that I bought and planned to use, because there's nothing worse than starting a project and trying to recall what was bought. I tried to gauge how much of each color that I would need by how often it was used in the quilt, but I did not do the math to figure out exactly how many yards I would need. I also may have forgot to mention that this quilt did not come with a pattern, par say. I simply found a picture on Google of a pixel Mario and followed the squares.

If I had to guess, my order probably looked like this
1/2 yard of black
1/4 yard of yellow
3/4 yard of brown
1 yard of the off white
1 yard of the dark blue
1 yard of red
2-3 yards of light blue

However, I do believe that I did need to go back out and purchase more of the light blue, so my initial order may have been more like 1-2 yards.

As I said, I cut out all of those squares and then I just started pinning and sewing rows together. It I followed my little pixel picture and checked everything multiple times to make sure I didn't sew anything out of order. After a row of squares were sewn to each other, I just added them on to the quilt (I started at the bottom and went up from there)

This picture show how Mario looked when he was all pieced together. I felt pretty awesome when I got to this point, and did not realize how much more work I still had to do to attach the batting and the back.

I used red flannel for the back and I took Mario with me to the fabric store so that I didn't have to buy any more fabric than what I needed.

Once I had the middle and back laid out, I started in the middle of Mario's red shirt and started pinning him with quilting safety pins. I pinned about 40 squares at a time and then I had to sew around each square so that all of the layer would be tied together.


This project started around October and I worked on and off through January to finish it.

After I finished this one, I realized that I was going to be hooked on quilting! So, I bought some material to make a few baby rag quilts. Thank goodness those move along much quicker! I finished one in 2 or 3 weeks working on it very little. Perhaps you'd like to see it?