Cool Down Mini Quilt

Today I get to share the March Mini of the Month quilt! Every month in 2026, Stash Artists members receive a new mini quilt pattern and this month it's the Cool Down mini. If you're not a member yet, come join us!

I always say that if I weren't writing and selling my quilt patterns, they'd be known as 'that blue one' or 'the one I gave Dad' or something like that. Naming the patterns can be so much harder than designing and making them! For this one, I was drawing a complete blank, so I reached out to some friends for suggestions. One suggested Cool Breeze, saying the blue said cool to her. I loved that, but there are already a couple of quilt patterns out there using that name. Darn. I kept toying with different ideas and asked ChatGPT for suggestions, but everything I liked was already a pattern name, until finally I hit on Cool Down. Considering that was only a day or two before I needed to upload the pattern to the Stash Artists site for members to download, it was a relief to finally have something that fit!

Cool Down is similar to Spin & Sparkle (which was the Stash Artists pattern for May last year), in that they're both large pinwheels made of smaller pieces, but Cool Down is not just a smaller version of Spin & Sparkle. It was fun creating both and playing with different ways to make the pinwheels.

I do wish I had noticed that the grey plaid-like fabric used in the bottom left portion of the center pinwheel was so close in value to the black. I feel like that takes away from the contrast of the central, small pinwheel, but I didn't notice it until the quilting was finished. I wasn't about to take it all apart at that point!

Most of the fabrics for the quilt top came directly out of my scrap boxes, though you'd never say that to look at them. My blues are overflowing! Good thing my plan for the May full size Stash Artists pattern will be primarily blue (though that still won't be enough to empty this basket).

I used two different brands of solid black (Northcott and Island Batik, if I had to guess, but I'm not certain for either of them). I could tell the difference by the feel of the fabrics as I was cutting them, but you really can't see the difference looking at the finished quilt. I figure 'scrap quilt' means using the scraps I have, even when that means mixing brands of solids. I've done the same in Stand Out Starburst (black, again) and Pinwheel Irish Chain (white) and it works just fine.

For the quilting, I decided to only use back-and-forth lines, using Aurifil 50 wt in 2600 for the grey sections, 4140 for the blue sections, and 2692 for the black. I left the center pinwheel unquilted, which gives it a little extra pop.

As usual, I love how it looks on the back!

I didn't think I had enough solid black left for the binding, but managed to find a piece hiding in the back of the drawer that was just big enough to work. I was very happy to find it because I didn't have anything else that felt quite right for the binding.

Cool Down has a winter feel to me, so it really fits that I took these pictures in the backyard, where we still have several feet of snow. 

If you love scrappy and stash-friendly patterns like Cool Down, you'll love the Stash Artists membership! Each month in 2026 there's a new mini quilt pattern, every other month there's a new full-size pattern (6/year, usually with multiple size options included), and we meet to sew together over Zoom every month, too! Learn more and join us here!

Thanks to Yvonne at Quilting Jetgirl, I'm trying to remember to take pictures of me with my quilts more often. No one was home to help when I took these pictures, so I draped the mini quilt over a tree branch and snapped a selfie with my 'the sun is really bright' squint 😆