At Long Last: Tetris Love

I'm a binge and procrastinate kind of crafter. The stack of almost-finished quilts (I think it totals 5 at the moment?) in my craft room is perfect evidence of that. I get super excited about a project, and the momentum usually holds out until I get to a boring part, or a hard part, or I run out of ideas. Thus the lack of updates for nigh on three months here.

But! I have been reinspired, and here is why: I finally finished a huge project! Allow me to introduce the Tetris Quilt:

The Tetris Quilt. It took forever.

This monstrously time consuming beastie has been floating around in the back of my mind for a year or two, ever since I starting making quilts the Dare To Be Square way. The push that finally made me start sketching was this awesome mug, a gift from my sweet husband.

pretty cool, right? ThinkGeek is an awesome website, by the way.

And something just clicked. So I started sketching. And since I can never make something easy for myself, I decided that this quilt should be a large twin size, and it should have a pieced back.

Sweet!

 Also, the entire thing would be pieced from 2.5" x 2.5" squares. That comes out to over 3,600 squares, cut, pieced and quilted.

just a handful of squares here

And sure, the designing, materials purchasing, cutting and piecing took a while. But it was the quilting that threatened to keep this project a half-finished work-in-progress for eternity. Because I thought it would be great to straight-line quilt through every single 2"x2" square (remember, almost 4k of these suckers.) Then I thought it would be even cooler to do a little free motion quilting around the inch-wide border.

Ignore all that cat hair, and focus on the quilting!

And to make it all super interesting, I would continue the straight-line grid around the outer border, sans quilted squares as a guide, which required lots and lots of measuring and marking.

that's a lot of quilting, I tell you!

So this thing sat on my sewing table, mostly quilted and partially marked (in messy, messy white chalk) for weeks. Month, even. Somewhere in there I got really sick of it serving as a glorified cat bed - by the way, did I mention that black fabric shows EVERY SINGLE CAT HAIR AND DUST MOTE that flies within five foot radius? because it sure does, and I'm never ever using black fabric again! - I finally sat down and did some serious quilting. And then the binding took maybe two days, and now it's done.

Tetris love

And I kind of really love it. I don't think I'm quite ready to let it live on my couch yet, given its high percentage of black (cat-hair-and-stray-fuzz-attracting) fabric, but eventually it may do so. I'm also thinking I might enter it into a very minor local quilt show this summer. And in the meantime, I'm ready to start something new, and maybe finish up one or two of those other long dormant projects...

Of course they love it.