craftgrrl | quilting advice needed (Reply)

So my one-year anniversary with the boy is coming up, and earlier this summer he showed me a Mario and Luigi quilt that he had seen on a SomethingAwful thread and commented on how cool they were and kinda jokingly asked me to make one. Well, I have three weeks left at home this summer and I figured hey, why not?

EDIT: Thank you so, so much for all of your comments! All of you were really helpful. I think I'm going to look for a simpler image to work with and see what happens (probably the red Mario mushroom); or, maybe just leave this project for Christmas instead. Thanks again!

Potential problem is, I have zero quilting experience, so perhaps this is too ambitious of an undertaking for someone who's never made a quilt before. I'm pretty good at figuring things out without tutorials and such however, and I think I can do it. And it's going to be smaller - more like a throw blanket. This is the image I've pixelated and simplified in Photoshop:

and I'm gonna put a grid over it and do some math so I can figure out just how to connect these pieces. My question is about the background. It would be SO much easier just to piece together the Bowser image and stick it on a piece of cloth for the background, but would that look weird in terms of texture? Do I HAVE to do the solid background in pieces too? It seems unnecessarily time-consuming. Also. The Luigi quilt looks more uniform piece-wise than the Mario quilt and is stippled. How do I achieve that look while connecting all these different pieces? Is stippling just for looks or what?

Sorry for the long post but hopefully someone out there can help :) Any other quilting tips (esp. easy ways to quilt this) would also be appreciated.