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?

WIPS-B-GONE 2026

It's that time of year - the annual WIPS-B-GONE challenge is open for registration! This is the 6th year for the free WIP-finishing challenge, and I'm excited to help motivate you to finish some long-standing projects (and to finish some myself!) 😊

What is WIPS-B-GONE?

It's two months to focus on making progress on your quilty works-in-progress (WIPs) with friends and some extra support from me. The challenge starts October 1st and runs until the end of November, so we'll have 61 days to work on those projects that have been sitting unfinished for too long.

Whether you have a collection of quilt blocks cut out, but not sewn together, or a stash of blocks finished, but not sewn into a quilt top, or a pile of quilt tops that need quilting, it's so much easier to use, display, or gift a quilt that's finished, so let's move some of them across that finish line!

Extra support to make it easier

When you sign up for the WIPS-B-GONE challenge, you'll get a link to download:

• a project list, so you can see at a glance which projects you plan to work on and check them off as you finish them
• a daily tracker (there are 3 to choose from!), so you can colour in an icon for each day you work on a WIP. The daily trackers are consistently one of the favourite parts of the challenge every year 😊
• graphics you can share on social media to show you're participating in the challenge and to invite your quilty friends to join us, too! The more, the merrier!

A daily tracker from a previous year

Monday Motivation

Along with the downloads, you'll also receive Monday Motivation emails all through the challenge to help you stay on track. Sticking with something for 61 days can be a challenge, and I hope these emails will be the extra dose of motivation you need to keep you going.

Community

If you're on social media, you can post your progress and use the hashtag #wipsbgone2026 so other participants can find your post and cheer you on. A challenge is more fun when you're doing it with friends!

Of course, you don't have to share on social media to take part in the challenge. Simply download your daily tracker, choose some WIPs, and make a little progress on them each day.

Finished the quilt top during WIPS-B-GONE 2024 - I'll still be quilting it this year

Are you in?

If you want to finish some quilts this fall, join us for WIPS-B-GONE 2026!