Portals Mini Quilt

As I mentioned last month, we're doing a Mini of the Month series for 2026 in the Stash Artists membership. Portals is the mini quilt pattern for February and I'm so in love with this little quilt!

I love that picture, too, even if it doesn't show the whole quilt. My sister-in-law and I went out snowshoeing Sunday afternoon, and I took Portals along to try to get pictures. We really wanted to stand it up against these trees, but it kept flopping over as soon as she let go of it, which made us laugh every single time 🤣 We finally managed to get that picture above, and then had to give up on trying to get a straight picture of the whole quilt there.

Instead, here's one of me holding it.

And another one that shows the beautiful scenery. This is just a few minutes trek through the woods behind our house.

Portals was inspired by some of the books I've read over the past few years:

• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix Harrow
• The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern
• Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
• The Unmaking of June Farrow, by Adrienne Young

In all of the books, characters find themselves traveling to other places and/or times through doorways they find. Aside from sharing the 'traveling through doors' part, the books are all wildly different and I'd be hard pressed to pick a favourite (though Every Heart a Doorway lands at the bottom of the list. It was okay, but not on the same level as the others). I guess it's like how we can make four quilts using Friendship Star blocks and they'd all be different 😊

A version of this design had been sitting in my EQ8 files for a couple of years, but I wasn't enthused enough about it to make it. That version was larger, with all the 'doors' coloured the same and lined up perfectly. I think I was going for a Roman aqueduct kind of look, but it wasn't working. When I was looking through my designs a few months ago, I tried colouring them all differently and staggering the middle row, and that's when I saw them as similar to the doorways in the books.

Of course, in the books the doors are scattered around here, there, and everywhere. The characters are either hunting for them or stumbling upon them, depending on the book. They're not all gathered neatly in one place where the character could look from one to the other and choose where to go. That works well for a book, but not so well for a mini quilt!

I chose the name Portals rather than Doors because I wanted to reference the fact these aren't ordinary doors just leading to the next room. They're portals leading to somewhere totally different and I had a lot of fun choosing fabrics that made me feel like I wanted to travel to the places behind them.

The doors are applique, with bias tape applique for the frame around them. That means the quilt top was really quick to put together. 

For the quilting, I used Aurifil 50 wt thread to match each of the doors and echoed the shape of the door, working my way in to the middle of the door. Then I used navy Aurifil to quilt three lines in the 'floor' under the two upper rows of doors. That fabric looks black in the pictures, but it is navy. Then for the background, I used white Aurifil to outline the doors and echo that line again, then I quilted a dense stipple all over the background. As always, I love how the quilting looks on the back!

There must have been a couple of snowflakes on the camera that created those blurry spots.

As you can see, I did all the echo quilting with my free motion foot, so the lines are organic and straight-ish rather than the perfectly straight and evenly-spaced lines they could be if I used my walking foot. I really don't enjoy quilting with my walking foot, though, so I prefer to embrace the imperfections of free motion quilting.

Making mini quilts every month is definitely helping with my stash of small pieces of Warm and Natural batting. Of course, I'm also making larger quilts, which produce those small off-cut pieces, so it's a never-ending cycle!

If you love scrappy and stash-friendly patterns (and mini quilt patterns!), come join us in Stash Artists! Along with the patterns, we also sew together over Zoom once a month, which is always a lovely time of community.

What fabrics would you use for your doors? And where/when would you want to travel?