Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Valerie: Zelda Quilt!

Alright, big news (for me) today!

I've been working on this project since our NimbleToad business meeting a few weeks ago, and I learned a ton along the way. One of the things that we focused on was finding something geeky that we're passionate about and creating related merchandise.

So, this is my first geek-inspired project.

The Legend of Zelda was my first video game love, and nothing has ever quite come close. I watched my (much older) brothers play the original game when I was young, and Ocarina of Time was the first game that I ever beat on my own, and one of the only games that I've played through more than once. Since then I've played almost the entire series and it still never gets old.

The wheels started turning, and I looked over my huge bookmarked list of 'I'll try these eventually' projects and came across this one: Modern Organic Fabrics: 3-2-1 Throw. The design was simple enough that I thought it wouldn't be too hard to spice it up with applique.

I'm going to be brave and show you my rough Paint brainstorm:



















I made the basic design and then spent a long time browsing Google and zeldawiki.org for items from the games to use, copying and pasting and changing the background colors. I originally thought that I would use items from Ocarina of Time, but I wanted to open up and use items that appeared in more games. Then I dug through my fabric stash to find out what colors and fabrics I actually had, and things changed just a little bit. I settled on three Triforce pieces, a heart container, a bottle, and the magic sword (from the original game, but it's a good representation of the Master Sword).

I drew the shapes by hand and then taught myself hand-applique to attach them to the blocks. I found hand-applique (using the needleturn method, good tutorial here and here) to be really relaxing, and I loved the near-invisible results.

So ... without further ado the finished result:



The back is a cheery yellow.



And the quilt is perfectly lap sized!



(Excuse the poor picture quality, it was dreary today!)

It took me probably 20 - 30 hours of work, but it should go much faster next time because I thought ahead and made stencils of the appliqued pieces, so I don't have to start from scratch n_n I'm so pleased with how it came out, and there are definitely many more in the future!

Edit: Now up for sale in the Etsy shop!

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