Engineers use diagrams like these to design circuits, and I think they’d translate fairly well into a quilt. There wouldn’t be a lot of color involved, nor a lot of actual piece-work, but I think a satin stitch to do the lines, and my embroidery machine to do letters and numbers, would make for something very cool.

My dad and my little brother are both engineers, so I may need to recruit them to do up a simple circuit design for me to play with.





Another fun project, once I get the hang of appliqué, would be a circuit board quilt– though hopefully a board a little less complicated than this one. The background would be pieced in the light and dark green to represent the paint on the board, and then I could appliqué on the chips, resistors, and whatnot. It would look especially snazzy if I used silver metallic thread to embroider on the letters and other small details!

Finally got all of the blocks completed! Nothing like seeing something close to a finished result to make pushing through the repetitive tedium of piecing worth it, huh?
I was unsure about some of the extreme color contrasts for a few of the colors, but seeing the whole thing laid out makes me feel much better about how the whole thing looks. Now I’m very excited to get the blocks put together and start getting borders on it!

I also did a test-run with the new block-construction method this afternoon, using some scrap fabric I had sitting around. (I think black, grey, and white will be a good method to show the different contrasting fabric pieces when I take the “final” pictures for the printed pattern.) Unfortunately, I messed up the math; I can never get the calculations for half-square triangles right! In this case, I think that to have 4.5″ finished blocks, I’ll need to cut the initial squares at 6 1/4″ in order to cut down the squares twice.
This leads to another bit of math– and to think I hated math in school– as I figure out how many pieces I can get out of each fat quarter, and whether or not I’ll have enough fabric to construct all the blocks. If my triangle calculations are correct, I may be short on the “medium” fabric for several colors. I’m reasonably sure I can finish the necessary pieces out of my stash, but I’ll need to account for that when I write up the pattern.
In all, I’m very excited that the fabric shopping went so well, and I’m looking forward to creating another geeky video-game quilt!

The additional benefit of making the pattern easier to create is that it makes me a lot more motivated to craft a second one. My first quilt wasn’t the greatest, craftsmanship-wise, as I hadn’t been quilting for very long when I started the project. Now that I have several years’ experience under my belt, I’m sure this one would turn out a lot better.
Who knows, given the popularity of the first one, I could see about making several of these to sell and probably make a good profit on them. Maybe if I’m lucky, I could even see about getting one accepted into a Child’s Play benefit auction or something like that.
At bare minimum, I’ll need to create a single set of colored blocks using the new pattern, since I’d like to take pictures to include in the written instructions. If it turns into a full quilt, then that’d be an added bonus!

The Morse code quilt is officially bound off and finished! I’ll be mailing it off for photography ASAP, and with any luck it’ll photograph better with a pro doing it as opposed to my quick shot on the living-room floor.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. I do wish the borders were a little bit wider, and the corners aren’t terribly straight, plus there’s a pucker or two in the backing fabric… but overall, I’m pretty happy with it. Besides, it certainly turned out a lot better than the last secret-message quilt I made, craftsmanship-wise!

I’m not sure what to do for my next project. I’m just not “feeling it” with the basket of FQs I bought lately, but I don’t have any inspiration for a new project. None of my quilt books have projects I’d like to do right now, and I don’t have the energy to try the paper-pieced Escher quilt I’ve been thinking about (re-) doing for quite some time now. I spent several hours wandering around the fabric store, and still don’t have any grand ideas.
I did fall in love with this kitty-print fabric, though, and I’m sure I’ll come up with something out of it. (The striped fabric says “Goldfish <3 tunafish <3 any fish <3″ and is absolutely adorable!) Time to go poke around Quilter’s Cache and see what I can find!

The top is finally pieced, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with how it turned out. It ended up a lot bigger than I’d planned, since I made the decision to space out the horizontal rows, but at least it’s very nearly twin-sized now. Unlike my first quilt in this style, it actually lays flat with no puckers, wrinkles, or wonkyness, probably because I used much bigger pieces. Overall, I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.

Luckily, I wrote which color goes on which bit of grid using magic marker, so it’s not too difficult to make sure the right bit of fabric ends up back in the correct spot. However, it’s quickly becoming tedious to double-check that all of the pieces are in each row before I begin sewing!