Time for a Mario quilt?

I've been fighting the desire to make another quilt for myself, but I think now is the time to get started. Inspiration calls, and who am I not to listen? Don't get me wrong, I still love my R.E.M. quilt, I just want to make another. I would like to make a smaller quilt this time since my R.E.M. quilt is the size of a queen bed comforter. Inspiration struck when I was looking for ideas for Ari's Mario bedroom. I stumbled upon this pattern:

Ah-ha! A Mario quilt! How cool. I looked at Google images to see what other people have done, and there were quite a few Mario quilts out there. This has been in the back of my mind for some time and I am ready to get the ball rolling on it.

With Super Mario Bros. for the NES being an 8 bit video game, all the images are made with the combination of distinguishable different colored squares. Since quilting is basically cutting squares of fabric and sewing them together, I can use game images as a reference to do any design that I want. All I have to do is sew the different colored squares together to get the image that I am looking for. Easy, right?

I am still thinking about the different designs I can do, and narrowing them down will be a challenge. I don't know if I want to do one big Mario, or incorporate other characters or objects. The sky is the limit, it just depends on how many squares I want to cut. When looking for ideas, I came across this cross-stitch pattern:


As you can see, this design is just made up of little squares as well, so I could make it into a quilt. I really liked this design until I got to counting all the squares I would need. I did some math and found that I would need to cut 30,000 individual squares to complete the front of the quilt. A little bit more than I was bargaining for. Plus, it would be 200 squares wide, and 150 squares
tall. So, even if I cut 1/2 inch squares, it would still be as big as my R.E.M. quilt. In other words, not gonna happen.

So, my search continues for a pattern, and I'll most likely come up with one on my own. I'm looking forward to this new endeavor, though, and will post updates as my new project continues.