Ygritte – Game of Quilts!

I recently entered the BadAss Quilters Society‘s quilt challenge called “Game of Quilts”. I finished my quilt last week and sent it in, and now I’m ready to enter my online submission. You can see all the entries here at the Game of Quilts Challenge! Squee! There is even going to be a physical show in Chattanooga Tennessee in September – if you’re close by, check it out!

The challenge had two colorways to choose from in the Peppered Cottons fabric line by Pepper Cory. I chose: “Blood, Stone, Steel and Fire” and received these 4 fat quarters to use in my quilt. The challenge was to use ONLY these 4 fabrics for the quilt front.

I spent a week working on a line drawing. The hardest parts were the facial details, especially the eyes. For inspiration, I referred to a photographic illustration by Ania Mitura and to stills from the show for the facial details. After the drawing was finished, I printed paper templates to use for tracing for each color. I also printed out a scaled guide for placement. I used the paper templates to carefully trace the images onto Wonder-under then started fusing them to the fabrics. The light grey and dark grey were the first two pieces to put together.

Then I put my husband to work and had him screen print the words “you know nothing, Jon Snow” in the upper right corner. The quilt can have up to 20% embellishment added, so this was my ‘bling’. We used a discharge ink process which releases the dye from the fabric – no layer of plastic-y ink! You can even iron directly with no smearing.

Next, it was onto cutting more detailed shapes. I was recently gifted a set of Kai scissors – boy did that help! Thanks Rachel 🙂 Even though I tried really hard to make big, simple areas of fill in the design, they still seemed like very detailed pieces.

Using Wonder-Under was pretty fun… didn’t really feel like quilting, it’s more like fabric collage! It was really easy and now I have a few more projects in mind to put this to use!

Once I got the main red piece down, it was only a matter of placing all the little pieces of the burgundy color in the right places…

I did the face last so I could make sure the piece placement was correct. Just a hair off and it wouldn’t look like her! I stitched a straight-stitch around all the edges.

Once I had the top done, it was onto quilting. I quilted this using matchstick straight lines at the top and more dense lines in the dark red.  I used a squiggly fill for her fur coat. I thought I was done:

But as I was looking at the finished piece, I really felt like the face was just too puffy. In the wrong light, it didn’t really look like her, so I decided to quilt her face as well.

I went super dense… wasn’t my plan at first. I had wanted to quilt in nice contours that helped define the face, but after a few lines of quilting, I started questioning my decision because it was looking puffier and worse than before – so I went off and quilted the shit out of it! I like it better now.

I also made a label for the back…

What do you think? I love the end result! I’m looking forward to getting it back and hanging it in our living room. The Game Of Quilts will open online voting from September 16th – 19th, 2015.  Don’t worry… I’ll remind you 😉