Saturday, May 31, 2008

More Chessboards

Japanese Fans. Can White Mate?

I actually bought a set of Chess pieces with red and white to use on this chessboard. And while it looks crazy, it is a very playable board.

I loved this Martini fabric, and used the colors in it as inspiration for the Chessboard.

Sunflower Chessboard. I was surprised to find that a strong contrast between light and dark was not necessary in the design of a successful Chessboard.

Under the Sea. My son designed this Chessboard. He selected all the fabrics, and supervised the arrangement of the fish in the outer borders.

All these chessboards have 2-1/4" finished squares, The inner border is 1/2" finished, and the outer border is about 3-1/2". The chessboards have a denim filling, to keep them smooth, but stiff enough to be playable. They are machine quilted (in the ditch) and the binding is hand sewn. The fabrics are all 100% cotton.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Chessboards

I really did make 40 chessboards. Here are pictures of five of them.This red and gold number was the first one I really liked. It's the one my son took away with him the first time I made them. The squares are 2-1/2", a bit larger than standard.

This one is one I made for myself. I like the play of the white on the black squares, and the black on the white squares. If you click the picture to enlarge it, you can see that I also stenciled letters and numbers on the inner border, identifying the squares. This makes it easier to describe a Chess move (like Nxf2, for example.) The squares on this Chessboard are "standard" size, about 2-1/4"

I made this pink and black one for my niece, and made a little bag for the pieces. This one and the next one have squares that are 2".

This jungle themed one is my nephew's.

This is another one I made for myself.

You can click the photos to enlarge them. I'll post some how-to pictures soon.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Chessboard Quilt

My son came home from college one summer and asked if I could make him a Chessboard. I've been making quilts for years, and I prefer strip piecing, so making him a Chessboard would be pretty simple.

So I made him a quilted chessboard. Then another, and another. In the end, I made forty. Like any good quilter, I kept all the leftover bits. What does a quiltmaker make with leftovers? Another quilt.

I knew I wanted to do something interesting with them, so I decided to make a block in the shape of a long rectangle.I liked the fact that the blocks could be arranged differently.
I sewed about 2/3 of the blocks I needed, with equal amounts of left and right blocks.
Then I started arranging the blocks. At this point, I was able to determine just what I needed, for example, a left leaning block with a wide light strip at the top...
This is the finished quilt.