Piecepack Trophy Cloth

The Piecepack Trophy Cloth is a card-table-sized tablecloth embroidered with all four standard piecepack suit symbols, meant to be autographed by each PiecePack game design contest winner and passed on to the next one. I took a few photos of it before I mailed it on. Here's a shot of it spread out on a card table:

The cloth was finally finished, packed up, and shipped to Michael Schoessow on Monday, 3 March 2003. Mike will sign it, with an annotation that he was the second contest winner, then send it on to the third contest winner (Rob LeGood). I hope Mike takes the opportunity to play on it once or twice before he sends it to Rob; it's not really fair to him that we took so long to get the cloth together that he has hardly any time with it.

Here's a shot as the Trophy Cloth would be seen during a hypothetical piecepack game that requires placing the pieces of each suit next to their respective embroidered suit icons:

Here's a close-up of some of the very nice embroidery on the cloth:

Here's a side view of the tablecloth, so you can see where we signed it:

And this one is mostly for the sake of me and Marty -- a closeup of where we signed the cloth as the first winners:

It may look as though we pulled a John Hancock with our autograph, but it is very hard to write small with the fabric paint markers we were using, and there really is plenty of room on the cloth. It will be years (at the current rate of contests) before we run out of room for signatures on the cloth.

Technically, the embroidery was not that expensive, but the "digitisation", the conversion from a computer graphic of the logo into a set of stitches that the embroidery machine could use, was costly. (The whole piecepack community will reap a benefit from this investment, however, with inexpensive SeattleCosmic:PiecepackGear.) While Marty and I both have small businesses at the moment ("small" is the keyword here), we are technically unemployed, and we could not have gotten the Trophy Cloth out the door without the generous financial assistance of piecepack players like you: Michael Schoessow, David Hassell, and AlphaTim Schutz. Thanks a lot, guys! (The irony that Mike contributed a fair chunk of change to what was supposed to be his award does not escape me. Thank you for being patient, Mike.)

Goodbye, little Trophy Cloth! Come back to us soon! :)

--RonHaleEvans

Below are some photos of the Trophy Cloth as it was just before it left my care on January 13, 2005. Here's one of the whole cloth spread out on the floor so the entire thing is visible:

Here is a close up of the signature from the first contest winners:

Here is a close up of the signature from the second contest winner:

Here is a close up of the signature from the third contest winner:

Here is a close up of the signature from the fourth contest winner:

Here is a close up of the signature from the fifth contest winner:

-- ClarkRodeffer