Merry Mini QAL - Week 4 - Quilting

Welcome to week 4 of the Merry Mini QAL! How is your Merry Mini coming along? I have to admit that this past week I fell behind on my own QAL. I was doing really well, even with three mini quilts underway, but then we decided to go hiking twice this week. No regrets, both hikes were great! It just means that now I have some catching up to do. (And if you'd be interested in seeing some of my hiking pictures, you can follow me on Instagram!)

Even though I don't have my Merry Mini quilt tops finished, I do have all my trees made! I love this little forest.

Week 4 - Quilting

If you haven't already joined the QAL, there's still time to join in for some Christmas in July fun! You can pick up your pattern here. From now until the end of July, the Merry Mini pattern is 20% off with the code MERRYMINIQAL, which should already by applied if you click on the link. Once you have your pattern, enter your email address here to have the weekly emails sent to your inbox so you don't miss any of the QAL blog posts.

As a reminder, here's the weekly schedule. Click on the links to go to the previous posts.

July 1 - Make the text block 

July 8 - Make the alternating squares borders

July 15 - Make the tree borders

July 22 - Quilting

July 29 - Binding

Now that your quilt tops are put together (and mine soon will be, lol), it's time to baste and quilt them! I love mini quilts for a lot of reasons and two of them are that I can use scrap pieces of batting for them and I don't have to piece a back to fit! I can't explain why, but I can put dozens of pieces together for a quilt top no problem, but sewing even two pieces together for a backing seems like too much work. Another bonus - with a mini, basting goes so quickly!

Have you thought about how you'll quilt your Merry Mini? I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to repeat what I did for my first two, or if I'll do something different this time. In case you don't have any ideas yet, here's what I did before. All of this quilting was done on my Janome 6700 with Aurifil 50 wt. thread.

For any quilt with embroidery or applique, the hardest part for me is figuring out how to deal with those elements. Outline them? Stitch over them? It's so hard to choose! Because the Merry Mini letters are so thin, I chose to stitch kind of loosely around them, without outlining each individual letter. I stitched a meander with random snowflakes in the background.

Here's how it looks from the back.

An option I'm considering this time around is to quilt a rectangle frame around the words, separating them from the quilting entirely. Another interesting option, especially if you used fabric markers or crayons for your words rather than stitching, would be to quilt right the whole quilt with an allover motif, going right over the words. Something like a crosshatch, straight lines, or some stippling would look great.

These trees were so much fun to quilt! It doesn't show up well in the pictures, but I used brown thread to stitch back and forth lines in the trunks (that wasn't the fun part), then I switched to green thread to outline the tree and stitch swooping lines to resemble draped garland. I love how they turned out!

Another option would be to stitch back and forth lines in the green part of the tree, too, or wishbones, or to echo the diagonal lines of the sides into the middle. Or maybe join me in getting lost in Pinterest searching for ideas for quilting in triangles (I can't be the only one, right?).

Apparently I didn't take any closeup pictures of the alternating squares rows after the quilting, and I've given these two away, so here's the view from the back. I treated the white squares as part of the background. In the red and green squares, I used matching thread to outline the square, then quilted a swooping line from corner to corner around the square. Yes, that meant starting and stopping in each square individually, but there aren't a lot of them, so it wasn't bad.

These squares are pretty small, but there are still other options - back and forth lines (can you tell they're a standby motif for me?), or maybe just outline the squares and don't quilt anything else in them. They'd stay kind of puffy that way.

I think the Merry Mini would also look great with some big stitch hand quilting, either as an accent along with some machine quilting or with only the hand quilting. I don't feel like taking on any hand quilting over the summer, but maybe some of you with air conditioning will do it so I can admire it.

I hope this post has given you some ideas for how to quilt your Merry Mini! Can you believe next week is the last (partial) week of July, and we'll be ready to move on to binding?

When you share pictures on social media, remember to use the hashtag #MerryMiniQAL and tag me (@devotedquilter on IG and @devotedquilterdesigns on FB) so I can see!