Sunday, July 27, 2014

Show me the Minis!



To say that I have been bitten by the mini quilt bug would be an understatement.  I am having so much fun with these, and have now completed six of them.

Four of them are Thimbleblossoms patterns:


Shown in the above photo are Spools, Puddle Jumping, Swoon and Red Letter Day.  All are mini versions of the original larger patterns.    Everyone seems to credit Camille Roskelly for starting the mini quilt craze.  As I understand it, she wanted to have smaller versions of her quilts to take with her when she travelled to Quilt Market, and a new trend for mini versions of quilts was born.

Joanna Figueroa of Fig Tree Quilts got into the mini quilt scene and introduced four mini versions of her quilt patterns.  Pictured below is my version of her mini Canned Pears:

Julie Herman of Jaybird Quilts has also published a line of mini quilt patterns.  Here is my version of her mini "Come What May" pattern.

With these 6 quilts I have a good start on my own mini quilt gallery.  I'll have to decide the perfect place to hang them.  In the meantime, I am enjoying  just seeing them stacked up into a lovely pile of minis!

Have a great week!


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Friday, July 4, 2014

Hooray for the Red, White and Blue (and Green and Orange)

My most recent mini quilt project was an appropriate one for the week of July 4th:

The pattern is called Red Letter Day, designed by Camille Roskelley.

I started with this selection of fat eighths:

The two fabrics on the left have a nautical theme of sailboats and anchors.  I was not sure if the navy/white sailboat fabric might be too big in scale for a mini.  I took a small ruler, and used 1/4" marking tape to create a viewer with a window the same size as the finished blocks in the quilt.


I still had some doubts, but I decided to go ahead and use the sailboats.  It was a bit of a leap of faith to  visualize the final block.  You can see that there's a big difference in the look of a finished block compared to an unsewn block.

I'm glad I stuck with the sailboats.  Here is the finished mini:

Kind of looks like fireworks to me.

Happy Fourth of July!

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Thursday, July 3, 2014

Canning season

I finished putting together the top for the mini "Canned Pears" quilt.
I decided to go a little rogue and put two of the leaves on the right instead of the left.  

The checkerboard border seemed like it should go together quickly, but it actually took me all day.

I thought I had been clever by cutting up any scrap pieces as I went along into the small strips that were needed for the checkerboard.  After the pears were assembled, I had a tidy basket full of strips ready to go:

I strip-pieced all the small segments into longer strips

then I trimmed them apart, and started sewing them together again
and so on, and so on....

After many ups and downs to the ironing board and the cutting table, I had only these:

It was barely enough for one side of the border.

See, I only thought that I was being clever.  Turned out it was much more practical to go back through my fabrics, and cut a strip from each one, pair it with a background strip and cut away...

I did end up using the pieces I made in the beginning, but it went much faster after I started cutting new strips.

Something else that should have made things easier, but for some reason was hard for me is that the pattern calls for the inner border to be cut a little extra large so that it can be trimmed down to match up with the checkerboard.  You can see in the photo that I trimmed a little off the top and bottom to make it even with the side borders:

In my excitement to see how it looked, I sewed the side borders on before I made a similar trim to the other 2 sides.  It took some fussing to figure out how make the top and bottom checkerboard border to work out,  but I got it eventually.

Anyhow, it's a really cute quilt, in a color palette that was very new to me but that I might just have fallen in love with.



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