introducing the quilt entertainment system!

17 nov 2015 @583 - stuff

My wife, Jessica, has a lot of really cool talents, one of which is sewing. She decided that she wanted to make a cool quilt for me last year, and a few months ago, SHE FINISHED IT! It is absolutely the greatest quilt ever made, and rather than just talk about it here, we made this video about it:

So yeah, it looks amazing, right? Take another look:

Yep. That looks amazing.

The characters chosen were chosen for a few reasons. They are either characters from games we loved as kids (Mario, Link, Kirby), characters from games we didn't get to fall in love with until we were adults (Trevor, Semia, Samus), particularly iconic NES characters (Bill, Ryu, Mega Man), or, in the case of Bubbles, characters who just fit well on the quilt. Jessica's main wish when we were working on the design was that it HAD to have Bowser, her all time favorite character, so of course he is there, along with my personal favorite: Balloon Fighter. Aside from our main choices, we also added a few enemy characters to fill space.

Why did we choose NES characters? Just seemed obvious really. Both of us love the NES, and the simple, fun, challenging games it had. The pixel art from the games lent itself really well to the idea of sewing squares together, so we went for it. I've personally been playing games as early as I can remember, with Super Mario Bros. 3 being the one that really drew me in. I was born four years after the NES was released in the states, so I didn't really get a chance to discover a lot of games back then, I just played the games that my parents and sisters enjoyed, which were the Mario titles. We had all of the NES Mario games, as well as a lot of C-list Konami games that we got from a friend who was a game tester for them or something (I'm talking games like Bucky O' Hare, which I loved, but was definitely not one of the premiere games Konami had). We got a SNES probably around when I was 6, which I was obsessed with. Again, just Mario games until a friend was getting rid of some games when I was 9, including Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong Country 2 and (most importantly) The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I fell in love with Zelda immediately, and started looking up more about it right away. This was about the time Ocarina of Time was coming out, but we wouldn't have an N64 for a couple more years. We did though, still have that NES, that I often played still. So I went to my local FunCoLand, and sure enough, they had a copy of the original Legend of Zelda. I was incredibly into it, and after a lot of searching, got Zelda 2 as well, which I was also super into. This led me to start looking into a lot of other games other than the Mario series that I was so used to, a lot of which were on the NES. Despite it being not nearly as powerful as today's systems, and certainly not as user-friendly in many cases, I am often drawn back to play NES games. It's not really nostalgia for me (though I AM very nostalgic), as most of the games on this quilt, I didn't play until High School, and some I didn't even play until a couple of years ago. I just really like how simple the games are, and how fun they are with what they use. My favorite example of this is Crystalis, a game I didn't play until I was 21. It's a classic game with swords and magic, that were it released today, would feature some sort of collectathon, a quest to get secret costumes, a cooking system, long cut-scenes and some sort of branching good and evil system. None of those things are bad at all, and I LOVE a lot of games that feature these elements, it's just sometimes I want a game where I am just shooting fireballs from a sword and riding dolphins.

All in all, this took about 10 months complete, which was a much shorter amount of time than we were expecting. We both work full-time, so most of the work was on the weekends, when Jessica could devote several hours at a time to the project. Despite us not having any sort of deadline (it was just for us, after all), she was incredibly excited and dedicated to getting it done. In addition to it being gigantic, it's also pretty dang heavy, certainly the heaviest piece of bedding I've ever held. We have yet to try it out for sleeping (we have many cats that we do not trust...) but when we do, we will let you know how comfortable it is.

Jessica is considering making a pattern for the quilt to sell, so if that is something you would totally be into, let us know in the comments on the Youtube video!