Racking up a High Score

This will likely take more than one post, because one just can't get all the fun from just a short post about a quilt this awesome. 

Let me begin.  A few weeks ago, while looking at all the wonderful quilts that had been entered into the Pets on Quilts Show, I found my way to a Quilt Along hosted by Melissa at Happy Quilting.  I thought this was such a great idea that I hopped over to The Fat Quarter Shop to see what they had in the way of some charm packs that might do the trick.  I fell in love with a pack of 5" charms in a rainbow of colors.  I grabbed a stack of those (four charm packs to make sure I had four squares to make up each of my playing pieces) along with one charm pack of black and a few yards of black Kona cotton for the borders and binding, all from Robert Kaufman.

I sat down with my numbers and Electric Quilt to design the layout of my quilt.  Since I love puzzle games, I've spent more than a little time getting those funny shaped blocks into line.  I wanted it to be believable to someone that has played the game.  No full lines near the bottom or anywhere else.  If you have a line, it has to have a blank (black, in this instance) block in it.  Otherwise, it would have zapped itself right off your playing field.  I was restricted in the number of playing pieces I could make, so this was also a consideration.  With only enough colored blocks for 41 playing pieces, I had to make them fit into the proper field.  I ended up with a field that was 10 blocks wide by 17 blocks long.  I widened the quilt slightly by adding a similarly sized sashing and a row of playing pieces to the right of the main play area that was only two blocks wide.

I sat down with my stacks of blocks and got sorting.  The colors were slightly intimidating, sitting in their little piles.  I knew layout would be an issue, so I ended up creating it from the bottom up, just like if I'd been playing.  The image from EQ was there to keep me on track.

I created the side piece first.  I figured the black squares could be used to fill in the top as needed.  Things diverged from the plan as the colors came into play.  I didn't perfectly match my colors in my EQ file to my real colors.  I really just used it to keep myself honest on using the different shapes of Tetris blocks.  I also needed to work in more of the black squares towards the top since I ran out of the colored blocks earlier than I expected.  This worked out wonderfully, though, since I didn't have any partial blocks at the top.  Next step:  Adding the sashing and borders.

Game paused until my next post.