Super Mario Quilt {Finish}

Thanks so much for all your words of encouragement yesterday. It must have worked, because I'm happy to say that today's marathon quilting effort (complete with extremely sore arms) paid off. Mario is done - a day early! Which means I can make some attempt to get the house sorted tomorrow before the chaos of ten small children arriving on Sunday :o)

I am so relieved he's finished - I had visions of finishing up the binding in the early hours of Saturday morning (thanks Susan!). But it went fairly smoothly today, so it's all good.

For the design of the quilt, I used the block Angela designed for her Mario QAL - but scaled it up to 3.5" squares. I actually strip pieced it in the end rather than using squares, so it came together pretty quickly, without too many seams to match. With the borders added, he's finished up at about 65" square - perfect snuggling size for my soon to be 6 year old little boy!

Please excuse the black seeds I accidentally knocked onto the quilt - didn't notice until I was looking through the photos tonight!

I'm really pleased with how Mario has turned out. He's fairly extensively quilted (aside from the borders) with various FMQ designs. Straight lines and pebbles for the most part, although I decided to try a maze-ish kind of design in the background, which I think looks pretty cool. It's not perfect (and I nearly stopped a short way into it) but overall I think it's effective if you don't look too closely at some bits. Normally I quilt myself into corners and have to stop and start - but surprisingly with this design I only did it once. My little boy has been asking for a maze quilt for a while, so I think he'll enjoy tracing his way through this one :o)

I worked entirely from stash on this one (aside from the backing). The solids are all Kona cotton, apart from the brown for the shoes, which is a shot cotton (I think?). I ran out of the background fabric part way through (I thought the yard I had would be enough - whoops!), so I've used two different kona aqua fabrics (Ice Frappe and another - not completely sure which one!) If I'd had more time I probably would have ordered a bit more of the Ice Frappe, but I think it looks okay anyway :o)

The quilting is all Aurifil 50wt, matched as closely as possible to the fabric. My recent win came very much in handy for the red, dark blue (Kona Ocean) and yellow buttons. I'm beginning to acquire a stash of Aurifil that challenges my fabric. Ok, maybe not quite, but I have thread in just about every colour I'll ever need ;o)

I think my favorite part is his ear :o)

And the back is perfection - confirmed by master 8 (who incidentally thinks it is a very cool quilt, and has asked for Luigi for his bed. So I think I've done well!) I would have liked to use the same red as the border for the binding, but I ran out. I ended up using a print from Tufted Tweets by Laurie Wisbrun, which works quite well and is in keeping with the white/red spotty mushroom theme on the back.

Needs to be washed still, but I can't wait to pop this on the birthday boy's bed while he's asleep tomorrow night - I really hope it's all he dreamed it would be.

xx Jess

Linking up to Le Challenge

A Lovely Year of Finishes

and the Finish Along 2013