CCG Quilt: first finished project of 2009!

[jaina]

Okay, this one's a bit of a cheat-- it was about 99% done at the end of 2008. ;-) And I started it, um, almost five years ago. (Oops?)



sirrogue is an avid player of customizable card games (CCGs)-- mostly Star Trek these days, but he used to play a lot of Star Wars too (among other things). Decipher, the company that made the games, used to give T-shirts with images of various cards as tournament prizes. Rogue had a bunch of them, and they were starting to get kind of old, so I offered to make him a quilt out of them...back in 2004. I got the whole quilt top made, and got it pinned together with the batting and backing, and there I stopped. For four years. Because I couldn't figure out how the heck to quilt the darn thing. It was way too big to quilt with my sewing machine, the thought of quilting the whole queen-sized thing by hand made me want to cry, and I didn't want to obscure the images with yarn ties.

Somewhere in the past four years, I did some googling and discovered the "invisible" quilt tying method, where you use a long piece of thread/yarn/string/whatever (I used thin crochet cotton) and a long doll needle, and basically you thread the yarn through the batting and every few inches, you come up, take a stitch or two all the way through, then thread back into the batting. But I still didn't actually quilt the thing. Then in November of this year, vampiretheatre posted a T-shirt blanket she'd made of her old MTG shirts, and I was like OK, it is time to finish this freaking thing. I tried to get it done by the end of 2008, but didn't quite make it. It was all quilted, but not bound. I started binding it on New Year's Day, and I finished this morning!

Specs: It's queen-sized, 100" x 85". I did use the invisible quilting method, making little Xs as my stitches. The t-shirt parts are all backed with iron-on interfacing, the cheap stuff from JoAnn. (Next time I'm getting nicer stuff.) The backing, binding, and the in-between blocks are a quilting cotton, little white stars on blue fabric. The big blocks are the cards from the front of the shirt and the slogan from the back, and the little squares are the logo from the sleeve.

The Star Wars cards:
Boba Fett
Leia Organa
Jabba the Hutt
Yoda
Millennium Falcon
C-3P0
Grand Moff Tarkin
Obi-Wan Kenobi
General Veers

The Star Trek cards:
Data
Dukat
Jean-Luc Picard
Worf

The slogans:
"Never underestimate the power of the Force"
"Expand your power in the universe..."
"Choose Your Path..."

Here is it all laid out (upside down) when I first pinned it together over four years ago (look at all the furniture we don't have anymore, and how few DVDs there are!):



I think he likes it!



PHEW. Man am I glad to have that finished!

Comments

[brightcupenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :)

That is indeed the method I used. It was really quite easy and not too fiddly at all! I just spread it out in front of the TV and did a few rows a night. If you click through to the super high res version of the first picture, you can see the little Xs of my stitches.

[anomilygrace.livejournal.com]

Oh! Yes, yes, I can. That looks really neat. I'm in the process of doing a quilt that I was planning on tying, but the more I think of it, the less I like the way that looks. I want something a little more finished looking without trying to hand or machine quilt it! This may be the fun way to go. I'm kinda in love with the wee x's.

[brightcupenny.livejournal.com]

Cool! Let me know how it goes for you, if you decide to try it. Toward the end, I started to get kind of tired of it, but overall it was a pretty easy and neat way to get it done. The one thing I had to watch out for was, I had to be really careful that when I was going between stitches, I had the needle going through the batting, not all the way through and across the back. There were a couple of times when I inspected a line I'd just finished, and there was a big long stretch of yarn across the back of the quilt, and then I had to pull it back and redo it. :(