TGIFF - A Swap Mini

Welcome to TGIFF, the party where we celebrate all things finally finished! My finish this week hasn't been a long time coming, but I had to keep it mostly secret, except for a few sneak peeks, so it felt like a long time. Now that it's finished and in the mail, I'm writing about it here, but I won't share it on social media until it has been received. That means you're getting to see it first!

The swap was organized by the Canadian Modern Quilt Collective, run by Amanda Brown, and everyone who signed up was given the same fat quarter bundle from Camelot Fabrics. It is amazing how different the quilts all look, considering we started with the same fabrics!

My partner, Laurie, said she doesn't care for purple, so I left that fabric out. I used two blocks from the Women of Wisdom quilt, making two of each of them. That allowed me to use all of the fabrics, minus the purple, with one fabric as the binding. Laurie also said she likes graffiti, so I chose to do relatively simple piecing, with intricate flow (or graffiti) quilting. I had so much fun with the quilting!

I used the leftover fabric to piece the back, too. My dislike of figuring out how to fit pieces together to make a backing isn't quite as strong when I'm only fitting a 24" square quilt, especially when I have fairly large pieces leftover to work with. I also had enough of the green leftover to make hanging corners.

Once the front and back were pieced, I pulled out a scrap of batting (yay for using another scrap!), and got to the best part - the quilting! I considered custom quilting the stars, with the flow quilting only in the background. I also considered quilting each square in a different colour, probably to match the background. In the end, though, I chose to do flow quilting over the whole quilt using Aurifil 1231. I worried it might take away from the piecing too much, but also wanted it to be noticeable since grafitti isn't subtle, so I just went for it.

I had a partial bobbin of 1231, so I started with that for the back. Once that ran out, though, I realized I'd never have enough if I kept using it for the bobbin, too, so I switched to 2110 for the bobbin. The switch is noticeable on the back, but hopefully Laurie won't mind (and it is on the back, after all). Apparently I didn't think to take a picture of that before mailing the quilt, though.

Even with 2110 in the bobbin, I was playing thread chicken. I kept reminding myself not to quilt too small, and really hoping the 1231 would last.

It didn't. I was sooooo close to being finished when I ran out of thread! To make matters even worse, if I hadn't used that partial bobbin at the beginning, that would have been enough thread to finish. Ugh.

No shops near me (like within less than a 7 hour drive) carry Aurifil. Getting a spool shipped to me would take well over a week, and I didn't want to pay shipping for just one spool, so that wasn't really an option. There are a few quilters here in town, but none use Aurifil. I figured my only option was to pick up a small spool of Guttermann thread, assuming the local shop had one in a colour close enough to match. Of course, the shop is only open a couple days a week (have I mentioned I live in a very small, rural town?), so I had to wait to see what she had.

While I was waiting, I ran into one of the other local quilters at the post office, and showed her the picture of my thread chicken loss. She suggested I come to her house to see if she had a spool of Glide that would be close enough, so I did...and she did!

I timed myself doing that last bit of quilting, and it took 7 minutes. That's how close I was to having enough thread. Fortunately, the Glide blends almost perfectly, so you'd have to know where to look to see the difference. Can you tell where the Glide thread is in this picture? Even if you can tell, it's a pretty good match, isn't it?

We've had a long run of rain, drizzle, and fog (RDF), followed suddenly by a couple of very hot and humid days. On one of the hot days, I escaped to the beach to put my feet in the water, and I took the mini with me for a photo shoot. We don't have sandy beaches around here, but I do love this rocky one.

It was really windy, hence the rocks weighting the quilt down. Even with the rocks, just after I snapped this picture, the wind grabbed the quilt and tossed it into the air. Fortunately, it sent it flying towards me rather than towards the water! Oh, and do you see the iceberg across the bay? I could see several from the beach that day 😊

That's my finish! What have you finished lately? Link it up below, and be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too.

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