Pixelating Blog Hop- wait till you see this quilt!

Hi friends!

Today is my day on the Pixelating Blog Hop! The what you say???

My friend and really cool designer Toni Smith, aka Quiltoni, has a book called Designing Block Quilts. To launch her book, she asked some people to designs quilts using the ideas in her book. 

The book shows you how to create a quilt from an image using squares, strips or the Quiltoni way, which kind of chunks the sections out. After looking thru her book, I thought this would be so much fun to try! First, I had to come up with a picture I wanted to “pixelate”. 

I choose this one of Kira.

Then I loaded the image into Photoshop and had it create a pixel version. This is what the image looked like when I printed it out.

Next, I limited the color palette. I wanted to depict the pup and the deck behind her. All the rest of the stuff could go away. 

Then I needed to create areas of the pattern to start cutting and sewing.  I ended up using  a combo of Toni’s methods to create the quilt- some squares, some strips and some chunks!

I made copies of the pixelated quilt and started drawing lines on the picture to break the image into squares and strips. Then I took those squares and strips and recreated them on graph paper. I picked my fabrics and some thread and I was ready to cut and piece!

I must admit, I waited until the last minute to get this quilt top done. Literally done in an afternoon. I had about half the quilt graphed out and just graphed, cut and sewed the rest all in one sitting! 

And voila! A quilt top just in time for Quilt Market!

And yes, there are a few areas I would change up if I did it again, but overall, I think it looks pretty good. 

Now I needed to quilt it. Luckily for me, I had the opportunity to play with some great thread from A& E Gutermann! Don’t these look great!

I do wish I had picked another grey/tan color instead of the blue but I can make it work! I am using the 2 light colors in the light areas of the pup. I am glad I have a white for the really white areas and an off white for the softer white areas. The white areas look really clean that way.

I am doing my own quilting on this quilt which, as many of you know, is a big deal! I usually quilt by checkbook.

For the deck planks, I am quilting straight lines.

For the pup, I am quilting squiggly lines. I think the squiggly lines add to the idea of her fur but still feel right with the pixel quilt idea. I wish the picture of the white quilting had come out better so I could show you. It looks great!

Not too sure what I will quilt for the tongue. Hmm.

And no, I am not done quilting it. I went away for the Thanksgiving holiday to see my son and his fiancée and I just got back yesterday. But it is started AND I will finish before the end of this blog hop. The hop goes until Dec 7th so check back here and I will post an image when it is all done!

So what do you think? Would you make a pixel quilt? What image would you like to pixelate? I have to tell you- it is fun to do AND it goes together pretty easy with all that straight line piecing!

Want to see what everyone else on the hop is doing? Here is the entire list of bloggers:

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Enjoy the blog hop!  Next week here on the blog will be my last post on the Border Quilt! Wait till you see the finished quilt; the quilting is awesome!

happy quilting,

Kate