A Kirby little secret..

It's time that I let you in on a little secret. During the move and my trip to Rhinebeck and all the insanity that came along with that stuff, I was working on a very important quilt commission.

It was for Nintendo of America. I was commissioned to design and create the quilt for Kirby's Epic Yarn game on the Nintendo Wii. Isn't that insane?! I'm still shocked and it's long finished and shipped out. We love Nintendo at our house, so even though the timing of this project was less than ideal, it was too awesome of an opportunity to pass it up. If you remember I made a Nintendo quilt for my husband a few years back. I don't think I ever posted a photo on the blog, so here's a picture of that one.



Now, on to the Kirby Quilt!

Here is a bad photo of Kirby overseeing the whole operation from the top of our fridge.



I made the whole quilt, all 119 inches (almost 10 feet!square), in the Kitchen because my sewing area hadn't been unpacked or set-up yet, in fact it still isn't. Gotta do that soon.

Here is my initial design plan. I created the grid in Excel, and then just coloured with pencil crayons. Once I decided what I wanted to do, I coloured in my Excel sheet on the computer. That's as high tech as my quilt designing goes. I prefer graph paper and pencil crayons.



The quilt consisted of 80 10inch quilt blocks created by Nintendo fans, media and staff. These were created using the White Bella Solid Layer Cakes and fabric markers. All of the fabrics, mostly solids, and a few prints were ordered from Fat Quarter Shop. Love them! Their fabrics on the screen are soo true to real life, which makes ordering from them awesome. The felt, buttons, embroidery floss came from Fabric.com. This was the first time I ordered from them, but I was very pleased and would do it again.



While waiting for the other blocks to arrive, I started creating my 16 10inch blocks out of felt and embroidery floss, and one big centre logo of the game. I was also asked to embellish each of the 80 blocks with a bit of stitching. Big job! Good thing I was between day jobs at the time. (Still looking for a day job btw if anyone has any leads on anything creative in the Toronto Area or work from home, please let me know)

Here are some of the blocks I received. Love the one on the top in the middle! It's amazing!



Here are my blocks



The centre square



Me and the final product! Ready to ship!



Some of the blocks and detail









And here is the finished quilt! Hard to photograph in the apartment so this one was sent to me.



I had no idea where the quilt was going to be displayed. Turns out it was at the Nintendo World store re-opening in NEW YORK CITY!! for Super Mario's 25th Anniversary. How awesome was that!



The above photo was taken by hello sandy at the Nintendo World store!

Here's a photo taken by GamingBits. That big green square in the top left corner is the back of the quilt hanging in the window.



and some more photos of the event are available here.

Yay! Feels good to get that secret out.

Oh and I got to play the game. Super fun!

Happy Quilting!