Bright Side Up Mini Quilt

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Welcome to this week's TGIFF party! I've been waiting to share this mini quilt for a long time. 

A few months ago, Monika of Penny Spool Quilts messaged me to say she was thinking about starting a subscription box that would feature Canadian quilt pattern designers and Canadian fabrics. When she asked if I'd be interested in being featured, I couldn't say yes fast enough! 

I'm incredibly honoured to have been the featured designer in the first Quilt the North box! Check out this Instagram reel if you'd like to see everything that was in the first Quilt the North box, which was sent out in September. My box got stuck in the mail thanks to the Canada Post strike, but it finally arrived last week. Isn't Maple the Moose adorable?

Now that the boxes have all been received, I can finally share my Bright Side Up mini quilt. Aren't these bright colours fabulous?

Because the box includes all the fabrics needed to make the project, the pattern has to be for a small project (think mini quilt, bag, cushion, etc) and can't require too many different fabrics. My EQ8 is full of quilts and blocks I want to make someday, so I went browsing through that to see if I had anything that would fit. As has happened many times before, I found myself staring at this quilt I designed several years ago. I love it, but every time I look at it I wonder, "Do I really want to make that many flying geese?" 

It wasn't a candidate for the box anyway, since it's a throw size quilt, so I was about to move on and keep looking when I realized that just one block would make an excellent 20" square mini quilt. Ooooh, I liked that!

Then I had to choose fabrics from Northcott. No hardship there, Northcott's COLORWORKS solids are my favourites and the ones I use most often, anyway. Picking what colours to use was tough, though! I kept mocking up the block in different colour combinations in EQ8, and I loved every variation. Eventually I had to make myself stop playing and just choose 😂

The winning combination is COLORWORKS Dandy Yellow, Admiral, Patriot Blue, Love Potion and Toscana Ebony. I used COLORWORKS black for the background for mine, but it wasn't available when Monika ordered the fabrics for the box, so we substituted the Toscana. I love Toscana fabrics, too!

Though I'm not keen on making as many flying geese as I would need for a throw size quilt, I do like making flying geese using the 4-at-a-time, no waste method. I'd love to know who looked at 5 squares of fabric and thought, "If we sew them like this, cut them like that, then sew like this, and cut like that, we'll have 4 flying geese." My brain does not work that way, so I'm glad hers did, whoever she was! It's kind of like when I think about all the steps involved in getting from cacao beans to the chocolate we eat...who figured out that process?

I really love designs that take common units, like flying geese, and turn them into fun quilts. That's exactly what Bright Side Up is - classic units that come together to make something that looks more complicated than it is. I love quilt photography sessions at the beach, too 😍

Most of the time, when I'm working on a mini quilt, I'm going to do some custom quilting. Though I've moved away from doing that on larger quilts because of all the time it takes, I love doing it on mini quilts! As always, I used Aurifil 50 wt for all the quilting, which was done on my Janome 6700 domestic machine.

I started with the continuous lines in the pink flying geese. That's one of my favourite designs to quilt in triangles because it's quick and it doesn't have to be perfect to look good.

I did teardrop flowers in the blue flying geese (what would you call this design??). This is another design that doesn't have to be perfect to look good, plus you can do any size teardrops and add as many as you need to fill the triangles.

Then I did dense back and forth lines in the yellow star points. I love the texture that comes from quilting simple back and forth lines!

I probably spent the most time trying to decide on a design for the blue squares. I ended up choosing to quilt diamonds in the center of each square with straight(ish) lines. They're nowhere near perfect, but that's pretty much a theme in my quilting, so it's all good.

Once all the bright coloured sections were quilted, I did a dense stipple in the background. Black thread on black fabric is never easy! There were several times I quilted over lines I had already done before I couldn't see the thread. While that's technically a no-no for stippling, I don't think anyone will ever notice or care.

I'm obsessed with how the quilting looks on the back!! All that texture is just amazing and the black thread shows up much better on this side.

I've seen two finished Bright Side Up quilt tops so far, which is always fun. I'm really looking forward to seeing how people quilt their mini quilts. Even though we're all using the same fabrics, they'll still look different depending on how they're quilted.

If you want to meet new Canadian quilt pattern designers, sign up for the Quilt the North subscription box! The next box ships out in December, featuring a Nova Scotia designer.

That's my finish 😊 What have you finished recently? Link it up below, then visit some of the other links to celebrate their finish, too.

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