Lately I have not posted many completed works. I have been quilting for others, which, though rewarding seems to slow progress on my own projects. But, I persevere… This one took me less than 1 year!
I started this quilt back in November of 2015, on a whim, during a visit to Quilted Memories. I remember picking up a stack of solids and talking to one of the ladies cutting about my plan to make a Minecraft quilt for my son that I had seen on Pinterest.
Creeper was completed in November of 2015, then in January he was followed by an enderman, cow, and a pig. Steve, the chicken, lava and diamond ore came later, much later. If you remember in my previous post, my son declared that he wanted an Enderdragon on his quilt.
Yes, I am glutton for punishment. I couldn’t resist the challenge.
GAME ON!
An Enderdragon was born out of fabric in my stash. I designed him in EQ7 as four separate blocks, based on a perler bead image I saw at Kandi Patterns online. I didn’t want to use all small blocks like a bead pattern does, so created the pattern out of a mixture of large and smaller squares.
Originally he was on a solid background, but I felt that white just wouldn’t work. I couldn’t use black or grey, as it would blend with his body and wings.
In comes Max (he is 8). He sees my design.
“Cool! That’s epic”, he says (or something like that. I am glad he approved.)
Me: “Max, what color do you think the Enderdragon should be on?”
Max: “Mooom, Enderdragons live on enderstone.”
Me: “What’s enderstone?”
Max: “Duh, just google it, here I will show you.”
Max proceeded to pull up an image of enderstone on my computer. There it was in all of it’s stoney glory. Max helped me pull out scrap squares of tans from my box of brown and tans from his great grandmother’s stash. Stone is good practice for random.
After finally assembling the four, 24″ squares of the dragon, I assembled him in all of his glory. As the dragon took up my entire design wall, I realized that I needed to come up with a plan for the rest of the quilt, that would now be a king size! I used MS Excel to layout my borders and sashing. What you see was my final pick. I didn’t keep all of my sashing and borders equal because if I did, it wasn’t going to fit on my longarm!
The quilt is hanging from my second story bannister below. It is the largest I have made to date. I think, in minecraft, the enderdragon prevents players from leaving “The End” until he is defeated. Once defeated, a player gains lots of “experience”.
A special challenge deserves a special label. I digitized and embroidered the minecraft diamond sword and font. This was my final touch to a “just because” gift for my son, and co-designer, Max.
Dueling Threads 
That’s amazing. I don’t have a gamer in my life so I didn’t understand a word of your post (LOL) but the blocks look great!
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Your Minecraft quilt is epic, especially the Enderdragon medallion-style in the center! I am designing a quilt in EQ8 for my soon-to-be 10 year old grandson from Kelli Fannin’s blocks with the Enderdragon rearranged to be a medallion block (wish I’d seen yours sooner, Id’ve asked for the pattern!) and all the character blocks reduced by 50% so can fit more of into his quilt. He wants them all! I’m also hoping I can use this as a teaching tool to lure him into learning to sew with me. Most of the character blocks should be pretty easy assembling and I think he’ll be able to that once the pieces are cut.
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Cool! That’s really cool!
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After seeing your Minecraft Quilt I was inspired to make one for my grandson. I read you used EQ7. I bought it and was able to import the Enderdragon and now I am having problems trying to trace the pattern into a block. I really could not find a tutorial on line or in the software that addressed how to Trace. Any help would be appreciated. My email is listed below. Thanks~ Tina McBride
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Hi Christina, I did use EQ7. I’ll email you a few How-to’s, but I don’t have a tutorial handy on how to do this. It is something that I plan to teach some classes on in the future. Since you are brand new to the software, I would suggest a book called “Pieced Drawing” by Patti Anderson and published by the Electric Quilt company. It has exercises to teach you how to navigate and design blocks in the software.
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My grandson loved the minecraft quilt! i would like permission to use your enderdragon for a quilt for him. I sat him down in front of EQ7 and had him design the rest of the blocks for the quilt. He did pretty good for a 7 year old. I might enter it in a local show and would give you credit. thank you so much!
Merna
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Merna, I’m so glad that you were able to do this with your grandson. Please, by all means, make him an enderdragon. I think it would be great! Thanks.
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Hi Ramona. I don’t sell the pattern due to licensing concerns. However, you could build the dragon by taking a look at pixelated artwork for perler beads. It’s where we got our inspiration!
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