In Focus Mini Quilt

Sometimes (often, if I'm being honest) I need a deadline to get things done, even when it's something I want to do. Case in point - hosting TGIFF again this week is exactly the motivation I needed to share another one of the quilts I've finished in the past few months. So, without further ado, allow me to introduce my In Focus mini quilt.

In Focus was the Mini of the Month pattern for Stash Artists members in July. The pattern is available to members, including new members, along with the whole Stash Artists pattern library, so come join us if you'd like to make your own In Focus mini quilt.

I've said before that I have a hard time naming my quilts, but this one was relatively easy. Have you ever taken a picture with a DSLR camera set on manual, where you had to twist the lens to focus the picture? Can you remember the lines that were there when you looked in the viewfinder, showing where the camera was focusing? That's what this mini quilt design makes me think of, and what inspired the name.

In Focus was fun to piece because there aren't a lot of pieces and there are no places where the seams have to match up! Talk about a relaxing sew! 

Once the piecing was done, it was time to play with the quilting 😊 I started with the big flower in the center square. As always, my flower petals are uneven - I don't think any two of them are the same - but it all works in the end. I added short, wiggly lines going into each petal, to give the petals a little extra dimension, and pebbles in the flower center. To finish off the center square, I echo quilted around the outside of the flower, using the edge of my free motion foot as a guide, and then filled in the rest of the square with a dense loopy meander.

The inner 'corners' got a feather-like motif, with a dense stipple in the small spaces around them. The outer corners got wishbones, which is probably my favourite design to quilt in rectangular spaces like this. Don't look too closely at the wishbones in the corner, though. I definitely need to practice turning corners with this design!

The teal background is quilted with a somewhat less dense loopy meander. With all the quilting, and the teal thread for quilting the background, the back looks fabulous!

I try to remember to add triangles to the corners of the back of my mini quilts for hanging them, but I'm only successful about half the time. In Focus was not one of those times. I didn't even realize I hadn't thought of them until I was looking at the pictures. Sigh. I did remember my label, though!

I can't believe I'm almost at the end of the Mini of the Month pattern series in Stash Artists. Where has the year gone? That being said, I am kind of looking forward to a more relaxed pace next year, when I won't be making and writing the pattern for a new mini quilt every month 😅

That's my (finally blogged) finish for this week. What have you finished lately? Or not so lately, as the case may be... Link it up below and be sure to visit some of the other links to admire their finishes.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Chosen Family Mini Quilt

Welcome to another TGIFF (Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday) party! My finish for this week is the Chosen Family mini quilt, which is the Stash Artists Mini of the Month pattern for October.

It's no secret I love raw-edge machine appliqué. It's quick, it's fun, and you can create all kinds of shapes that would be hard to do with piecing, like these nested hearts. 

Sometimes I make it even faster by not stitching around the appliqué shapes before the quilting, so the quilting serves to both secure the appliqué shapes and hold the three layers together. I didn't go that route this time, though, instead I chose to stitch around the hearts with a zig zag stitch using matching Aurifil thread.

When I was stitching around these hearts that are close, but not touching, I kept thinking about the chosen family element of a lot of the books I read. Chosen family, whether in fiction or real life, refers to people who aren't related by blood, but have chosen to love, trust, and support one another, with the fellowship of the ring being a classic example. I love when chosen family is part of a story, when we get to see how the characters are there for one another and how they bond through the hard things life (or the author!) throws at them. It's nice when naming a pattern is relatively easy for a change!

I knew I didn't want to quilt the hearts, which is why I chose to stitch around them first, though I did quilt around both sides of each heart shape and then echo-quilted the outside of the bigger heart and the inside of the smaller one to give them extra definition.

For the background, I stitched a heart-and-loop meander, which is one of my go-to quilting designs. I love it because it's quick and simple, plus it can be done at any size. I used the same design on my Cross-Stitch Heart quilts, but on a much larger scale. The spaces between the two hearts in each block and near the center, between the four hearts, were too small to quilt hearts, so I just quilted the loops.

Of course, I love how the quilting looks on the back! I did consider using a print for the back, but I just couldn't pass up how beautifully a solid back shows off the quilting. Never mind that it's a mini quilt and will probably hang somewhere and the back will never be seen. The back should still be pretty, right?

The pink fabrics for the back and for the binding/hanging corners are different than the ones I used for the pink hearts. I have lots of small pieces of different solid pinks, but this bright pink is the only one I had that was big enough for the back. I've been making so many scrappy quilts over the past few years, and not really buying much new fabric, that my stash is dwindling before my eyes. I'm soon going to need to do some fabric buying to stock back up 😊 I don't think any quilter has ever been sad about needing to do that!

Since a mini quilt is too small for a quilt holder to hide behind, I was taking these pictures by myself in the backyard when I remembered that I'm trying to take more pictures of myself with my quilts. I could have asked Paul to come out to take the picture, but instead I just snapped this quick selfie with one corner of the quilt. I was even dressed to unintentionally match the quilt!

While the Chosen Family pattern is for a mini quilt, I think it would make a fabulous baby quilt, too. You could make four of the mini quilt and put them together to make a 48" square baby quilt, or you could make the mini quilt and then add wide borders in the same fabric as the background to give it lots of negative space around the hearts.

If you want to make your own Chosen Family quilt, come join us in Stash Artists! You'll get access to the Chosen Family pattern, along with the rest of the Stash Artists pattern library, plus you'll be invited to join our monthly Zoom sewing sessions.

That's my finish for this week 😊 Now it's your turn! Link up your finish below, then be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Shoo Fly Garden Progress Update

I put my Shoo Fly Garden blocks up on the design wall to make it easier to prep new blocks without repeating fabrics, so I figured it's a good time to share a little progress report.

Before I show you what I have so far, here's a look at the quilt I'm heading towards (eventually).

Yes, there are wonky block corners. I'm too lazy to fix the mockup!

I have a tutorial for the Shoo Fly Garden block and another tutorial for doing appliqué with a ladder stitch, which is how I'm attaching the EPP flowers to their backgrounds. The throw size quilt I'm working on requires 154 blocks. So how many do I have?

As of today, I have 27 finished blocks, 39 flowers appliquéd to their backgrounds and awaiting corners, and 7 flowers sewn together, but not yet appliquéd to their backgrounds. That's a total of 73, which is close to half the blocks needed. I also have hexies basted for a few more blocks, ready for the next time we're on the road. 

This month, I basted hexies and stitched flowers while traveling to St. John's and back (twice) and at a church women's retreat. 

I had been using adding the snowball corners as one of my leaders-and-enders projects (the other is making stitch-and-flip flying geese for my Flying Together blocks), but I've slacked off on that lately because I used all the black squares I had cut. The WIPS-B-GONE challenge starts on October 1st, and I plan to make cutting out more squares one of my daily tasks right at the beginning of the challenge. Now that I see them all together, I'm excited to get back to turning these in-progress blocks into finished blocks!

Obviously, I'm still a long way from finishing my Shoo Fly Garden quilt, but that's fine by me. I designed this with the intention of it being a multi-year project and I'm in no rush to finish. Do you enjoy long-term, slow stitching projects?