Portrait of a Flower Mini Quilt and TGIFF

Welcome to another TGIFF party, where we celebrate our finishes!

This year for Stash Artists members, I'm creating a new mini quilt pattern every month. I'm having so much fun with it! I have so many quilt ideas I want to make, so this keeps me playing with something new every month. If you're not a Stash Artists member yet, you can join us and get in on the mini quilt fun, too!

The April Mini of the Month is Portrait of a Flower. It's a fun mix of piecing and appliqué, with a big, bold flower taking center stage.

It was also ridiculously hard to get a good picture of it 😆 No matter what I tried, the colours look more flat than they are in real life. I bought myself a bouquet of flowers to use as a photo prop, hoping they'd make for more interesting pictures.

Even with a special daylight light and some editing, the colours weren't quite right. The flowers sure are pretty, though!

I've always loved appliqué quilts. My very first quilt was an appliqué quilt and I rarely go long without doing at least a little bit of appliqué. Like most I've done, this is fusible, raw-edge appliqué. I keep telling myself I'm going to learn needle-turn appliqué, but haven't tried it yet, probably because I keep doing EPP as my hand stitching project and there are only so many hours in the day!

I chose to only stitch around the flower pieces with the quilting, and I used my free motion foot to go around each shape three times close to the edge with matching Aurifil 50 wt thread (1135 for the yellow and 4225 for the purple). For the flower center, I also quilted a spiral from the edge into the middle of the circle. For the flower petals, I only quilted at the edges, leaving the petals to puff up a little.

For custom quilting like this, I'm usually making it up as I go along. I rarely know what I'll do in all the various parts before I start. So once the flower was finished, I looked at it for a while before deciding to do a dense loopy meander in the background around the flower. I then decided to do a tiny spiral meander in the purple. I didn't realize before I started how similar it would look to the loopy meander around the flower, especially since they're both pretty much the same scale, and by the time I noticed I had quilted enough of it that I wasn't interested in ripping it all out. I'm calling it a lesson learned, not a mistake!

The back and forth lines in the white sashing break up the sameness of the quilting nicely. The yellow cornerstones have the same back and forth lines, but on a diagonal.

I love, love, love how the quilting looks on the back!

The flowers do make a nice prop 😊

For the binding, I really wanted to use the same dark purple I used for the flower petals, but didn't have enough. Purple is one of those colours that can be hard to match, since it can have either blue or pink tones, and I didn't have enough of any other dark purple that had the right tone to match the flower. I did have two that were similar enough that I thought I could get away with using them both, which would give me enough for the binding. It's really hard to tell it's not the same fabric all the way around the quilt!

When I was decorating for Christmas, I was looking for a place to hang my Let It Snow mini and ended up using really strong magnets to hang it on the fridge. Since it wasn't Christmas-specific, I left it up until almost the end of March, but then it felt like it was time to take down the snowman (even though we still have a lot of snow!). The fridge felt really bare, though, so I tried Portrait of a Flower and was thrilled to see it fit perfectly. The magnets are from the innards of a computer and their odd shape looks kind of like a frame on the corners of the quilt. I think I'll always have a quilt on the fridge now!

That's one of our wedding pictures above the quilt

That's my most recent finish. What's yours? Link it up below, then be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

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