Rainbow Mini Swap 2015

Last week I showed you the mini quilt I sent to my partner.  This week I want to show you the amazing mini quilt I received.

Nothing is quite as amazing as finding this in your mailbox.  It is like winning the lottery only it fits in the mailbox.

I often let the package sit on my table for a little while, savoring that it has arrived.  Then I have to rip it open and see what magic it holds.  This envelope was packed with awesome!

I had to pace myself.  I love that my maker Teri was so generous to include all these wonderful things.  I think the note card is the most important part of any swap (right behind follow through).  It is where you get to tell your partner something about your process and how much you enjoyed the making and gifting and how much you hope they like the item you've made just for them.

So many wonderful things in here.  Way more generous than I expected from any swap.  Fun things and handy things and just plain awesome things.  I need to put together a good name tag for guild so I can include all my pins and buttons and other bits of awesome.

Finally, the amazing rainbow mini quilt.  (Don't worry that chocolate was consumed far from this quilt and my sewing space.)  I can't use the word awesome again, so I'm going to have to find some more descriptive words.  Hold on....

Excellent, extraordinary, worthy, superior, amazing, and, and, well, awesome!  The colors, the background, the piecing, the quilting -- everything about it just makes me smile.  It hangs on my wall where I can see it and know that someone made it for me.  I love it!

Guild Name Tag Swap

The quilt guild I belong to (Baltimore Modern Quilt Guild) did a name tag swap in April.  I decided I wanted to play and threw my name into the hat.  This swap was for secret swap partners.  We all filled out a quick note that had our name and a thing or two we like and our preferred name tag size.  This taught me quite a bit about what people want for a name tag as well as how challenging it can be to work in 4" by 5".  

I really struggled with this project.  I wanted to make an embroidery design but my confidence with my embroidery software just isn't where it should be for that kind of work.  I must have worked for 6-8 hours with that software and I couldn't get a design I liked enough to stitch onto fabric and actually use.  In the end, I drew this simple mushroom and just started working.

Step one was to pick a background fabric and get her name embroidered on to it.  I even used one of my machine's built in fonts for this one.  I thought it was playful.  Then I traced the shapes of my rough drawing onto some fusible web.  I really took advantage of the fabric for the mushroom top.

Thankfully my fusible web was forgiving.  I forgot to applique stitch the stem before I pressed the mushroom top on.

I lifted the bottom edge of the mushroom cap and stitched down the stem.  Then pressed the cap back down and blanket stitched it down.  These are the kinds of projects that use up those bits of batting you don't know why you saved.

I did a little thread painting along the bottom to make it look like the mushroom was in the grass.  

I added some texture to the mushroom cap and the stem.

I quilted the background to give it some movement but my main goal was to really give the entire piece an equal level of overall quilting.  Time to trim and bind.

I used the same fabric for the backing and the binding. 

I wrapped it up for Monica. 

This was a great small project that I think took about two hours to complete.  Working at this scale isn't easy but I think I learned a great deal from this.  Mostly I learned to trust my instincts and know when to just go for it.

Rainbow Mini Swap 2015

A few months ago I came across a mini quilt swap that I wanted to participate in.  Kate Basti over on Instagram was hosting and I hadn't done a mini quilt swap (well, not a successful swap).  Seemed like the perfect opportunity to dive right in. I grabbed this charm pack filled with a rainbow of prints and did a bunch of thinking.

Here are the rulers I used for the basic block-making.  Nothing fancy here.  How to make the results fancy with only one charm pack?  I like to challenge myself.

Each charm could be cut into two 2.5" squares and two HST pieces.  I played with layout and ended up here.  This isn't where I stopped, though.

This collection of fabrics does not include a purple, so I had to pull this purple out of my stash.  I think it complements the rest of the colors nicely.

I wanted the colors to march across the quilt and give the impression of a rainbow.

I made enough of these blocks for two little quilts.  (Yes, I made myself one, but I think that is a good thing.  I will likely mix these up throughout the blog post.  Don't let this bother you.  The one intended for my partner ended up in her hands and the other on my wall.)

Next was adding a border to make these minis a little less mini and still meet the size requirements.  I went with an off-center layout from there.  Narrow and wide borders gave the little arrows some room to fly.

I quilted both of these mini quilts on my long arm.

I went with Angela Walters' hook swirl design as an all-over design for this quilt.

I put some of the left over charms into the backing.

A quilt like this needs an special label.  I found out that most embroidery fonts do not include a # as part of their character set.  I had to search through my collection until I found one.

Chevrons are one of my favorite fabrics for bindings.  I like stripes, polka-dots and chevrons for bindings.

The hardest part about this swap was keeping this little quilt under wraps until it was finished, shipped and received.  Swaps really challenge me because I have to wait to share and I'm just so excited about the project.

Have you joined any fun swaps recently?

Thread Thursday (on a Wednesday)

Yes, I'm a day early with the Thread Thursday.  I just didn't want to wait to share my new thread colors.

This month I got some new great colors of So Fine!  Look at that red, and rose, and brown!

This month I joined Massdrop.  I don't need most of what they sell, but I decided I needed this gauge by SimFlex.  I do recommend you shop around when you see a deal on Massdrop.  Not all deals are created equal.  In the end I only saved a couple dollars on the sewing gauge.

As always, none of these links is paid advertising.  I include links in case you are interested not because I am compensated in any way.