Chosen Family Mini Quilt

Welcome to another TGIFF (Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday) party! My finish for this week is the Chosen Family mini quilt, which is the Stash Artists Mini of the Month pattern for October.

It's no secret I love raw-edge machine appliqué. It's quick, it's fun, and you can create all kinds of shapes that would be hard to do with piecing, like these nested hearts. 

Sometimes I make it even faster by not stitching around the appliqué shapes before the quilting, so the quilting serves to both secure the appliqué shapes and hold the three layers together. I didn't go that route this time, though, instead I chose to stitch around the hearts with a zig zag stitch using matching Aurifil thread.

When I was stitching around these hearts that are close, but not touching, I kept thinking about the chosen family element of a lot of the books I read. Chosen family, whether in fiction or real life, refers to people who aren't related by blood, but have chosen to love, trust, and support one another, with the fellowship of the ring being a classic example. I love when chosen family is part of a story, when we get to see how the characters are there for one another and how they bond through the hard things life (or the author!) throws at them. It's nice when naming a pattern is relatively easy for a change!

I knew I didn't want to quilt the hearts, which is why I chose to stitch around them first, though I did quilt around both sides of each heart shape and then echo-quilted the outside of the bigger heart and the inside of the smaller one to give them extra definition.

For the background, I stitched a heart-and-loop meander, which is one of my go-to quilting designs. I love it because it's quick and simple, plus it can be done at any size. I used the same design on my Cross-Stitch Heart quilts, but on a much larger scale. The spaces between the two hearts in each block and near the center, between the four hearts, were too small to quilt hearts, so I just quilted the loops.

Of course, I love how the quilting looks on the back! I did consider using a print for the back, but I just couldn't pass up how beautifully a solid back shows off the quilting. Never mind that it's a mini quilt and will probably hang somewhere and the back will never be seen. The back should still be pretty, right?

The pink fabrics for the back and for the binding/hanging corners are different than the ones I used for the pink hearts. I have lots of small pieces of different solid pinks, but this bright pink is the only one I had that was big enough for the back. I've been making so many scrappy quilts over the past few years, and not really buying much new fabric, that my stash is dwindling before my eyes. I'm soon going to need to do some fabric buying to stock back up 😊 I don't think any quilter has ever been sad about needing to do that!

Since a mini quilt is too small for a quilt holder to hide behind, I was taking these pictures by myself in the backyard when I remembered that I'm trying to take more pictures of myself with my quilts. I could have asked Paul to come out to take the picture, but instead I just snapped this quick selfie with one corner of the quilt. I was even dressed to unintentionally match the quilt!

While the Chosen Family pattern is for a mini quilt, I think it would make a fabulous baby quilt, too. You could make four of the mini quilt and put them together to make a 48" square baby quilt, or you could make the mini quilt and then add wide borders in the same fabric as the background to give it lots of negative space around the hearts.

If you want to make your own Chosen Family quilt, come join us in Stash Artists! You'll get access to the Chosen Family pattern, along with the rest of the Stash Artists pattern library, plus you'll be invited to join our monthly Zoom sewing sessions.

That's my finish for this week 😊 Now it's your turn! Link up your finish below, then be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Shoo Fly Garden Progress Update

I put my Shoo Fly Garden blocks up on the design wall to make it easier to prep new blocks without repeating fabrics, so I figured it's a good time to share a little progress report.

Before I show you what I have so far, here's a look at the quilt I'm heading towards (eventually).

Yes, there are wonky block corners. I'm too lazy to fix the mockup!

I have a tutorial for the Shoo Fly Garden block and another tutorial for doing appliqué with a ladder stitch, which is how I'm attaching the EPP flowers to their backgrounds. The throw size quilt I'm working on requires 154 blocks. So how many do I have?

As of today, I have 27 finished blocks, 39 flowers appliquéd to their backgrounds and awaiting corners, and 7 flowers sewn together, but not yet appliquéd to their backgrounds. That's a total of 73, which is close to half the blocks needed. I also have hexies basted for a few more blocks, ready for the next time we're on the road. 

This month, I basted hexies and stitched flowers while traveling to St. John's and back (twice) and at a church women's retreat. 

I had been using adding the snowball corners as one of my leaders-and-enders projects (the other is making stitch-and-flip flying geese for my Flying Together blocks), but I've slacked off on that lately because I used all the black squares I had cut. The WIPS-B-GONE challenge starts on October 1st, and I plan to make cutting out more squares one of my daily tasks right at the beginning of the challenge. Now that I see them all together, I'm excited to get back to turning these in-progress blocks into finished blocks!

Obviously, I'm still a long way from finishing my Shoo Fly Garden quilt, but that's fine by me. I designed this with the intention of it being a multi-year project and I'm in no rush to finish. Do you enjoy long-term, slow stitching projects?

WIPS-B-GONE 2026

It's that time of year - the annual WIPS-B-GONE challenge is open for registration! This is the 6th year for the free WIP-finishing challenge, and I'm excited to help motivate you to finish some long-standing projects (and to finish some myself!) 😊

What is WIPS-B-GONE?

It's two months to focus on making progress on your quilty works-in-progress (WIPs) with friends and some extra support from me. The challenge starts October 1st and runs until the end of November, so we'll have 61 days to work on those projects that have been sitting unfinished for too long.

Whether you have a collection of quilt blocks cut out, but not sewn together, or a stash of blocks finished, but not sewn into a quilt top, or a pile of quilt tops that need quilting, it's so much easier to use, display, or gift a quilt that's finished, so let's move some of them across that finish line!

Extra support to make it easier

When you sign up for the WIPS-B-GONE challenge, you'll get a link to download:

• a project list, so you can see at a glance which projects you plan to work on and check them off as you finish them
• a daily tracker (there are 3 to choose from!), so you can colour in an icon for each day you work on a WIP. The daily trackers are consistently one of the favourite parts of the challenge every year 😊
• graphics you can share on social media to show you're participating in the challenge and to invite your quilty friends to join us, too! The more, the merrier!

A daily tracker from a previous year

Monday Motivation

Along with the downloads, you'll also receive Monday Motivation emails all through the challenge to help you stay on track. Sticking with something for 61 days can be a challenge, and I hope these emails will be the extra dose of motivation you need to keep you going.

Community

If you're on social media, you can post your progress and use the hashtag #wipsbgone2026 so other participants can find your post and cheer you on. A challenge is more fun when you're doing it with friends!

Of course, you don't have to share on social media to take part in the challenge. Simply download your daily tracker, choose some WIPs, and make a little progress on them each day.

Finished the quilt top during WIPS-B-GONE 2024 - I'll still be quilting it this year

Are you in?

If you want to finish some quilts this fall, join us for WIPS-B-GONE 2026!

Disco Squares Quilt

 In my ongoing quest to blog the quilts I've finished, but not yet shared, I'm happy to finally share Disco Squares with you!

Disco Squares was the Stash Artists pattern back in November. When I finished making it, we had a run of bad weather, so Paul and I were only able to sneak out one afternoon between rain showers to snap a quick picture for the pattern cover before it was released to the members. We had to be very careful the quilt didn't touch the wet, muddy ground and laying it down anywhere was definitely not an option. I figured it was no big deal, I'd just get the pictures for a blog post the next chance we had...and then promptly set it aside and didn't get around to taking those pictures until last month. Better late than never, right?

I loved digging through my scraps for the pinks, teals, and blues. Some of the black pieces came from my scraps, too, but I don't think I had enough to cut all of the black from scraps. That's one of the downfalls of waiting so long to write the post, I forget some of the details of the making. 

I do remember that I bought the cream solid because I wanted something softer than white. Cream isn't a colour I use a lot in my quilts, though I'm actually using it right now for the background of another quilt that will also be a Stash Artists pattern.

Finding enough blues was no problem, of course! Nothing seems to ever empty my blue scrap basket, or even get it down to just full, rather than overflowing 😅 I'm not complaining, though. Making scrappy blue quilts always makes me happy, so I'd probably be very sad if I ever ran out of blue scraps.

When it came time for the quilting, I decided to go bold and use bright pink thread (Aurifil 2530). I quilted a meandering spiral, intentionally not traveling directly over the same path in and out of the spiral. I love the randomly doubled look that gives the spiral. With the same cream solid on the back, the pink quilting shows up beautifully.

The day we went to the beach for this photo shoot was a little windier than is ideal for quilt pictures, so I caught this shot of the quilt trying to escape!

And here's the picture I was trying to get. I do love a quilt picture with the ocean in the background!

And pictures of quilts laid out on the beach rocks. Really, I just love any excuse to go to the beach!

The binding is scrappy, but it's all teals that are pretty similar, so it looks like it's one fabric until you get up close.

When we had a team of guys putting mini split heat pumps in the house in June, one of them spotted Disco Squares sticking out of a stack of quilts and commented that he really liked the colours in it. I do, too! Pink and blue together can sometimes feel childish, like a gender reveal or something, but I feel like I avoided that here by adding the black and cream. And because there aren't a lot of pastels, the combination of pinks, blues, and teals feels like it has a lot of energy.

Want to make your own Disco Squares quilt? Come join us in Stash Artists! Stash Artists is for quilters who want to use the fabric they already own, and new members get access to the Disco Squares pattern as soon as they join, along with the full pattern library of scrappy and stash-friendly patterns. There are virtual sew days, too, and we'd love to have you join us!

I'm still finding it hard to balance my work as a virtual assistant (which is all on the computer), my pattern business, (which requires a lot of computer work), and blogging (which obviously also has to be done on a computer), without feeling like I'm spending all day looking at a screen. I find it helps to do something active in between sessions on the computer, or to do some sewing. I still have a few more finished quilts to share, so I'm going to make it my fall project to try to get caught up 😊  Hopefully I'll be back next week with another one!

Friendly Wave Quilted Cushion

Sometimes vague ideas stay in my head for a long time before I figure out how I can translate the thought into a quilt design. This little cushion is one example of that, so I'm excited that now I get to mark it as a finish. Meet Friendly Wave, the Stash Artists Mini of the Month pattern for August.

I've been wanting to make something with a whale on it for years. Then, when I was first thinking about doing a Mini of the Month series in the Stash Artists membership for 2026, I made a list of all the possible themes/ideas those minis could explore and I added 'a whale quilt' to the list. That rattled around for a while before the idea of a strippy background made the whole thing start coming together.

If you want to make a Friendly Wave cushion, too, join us in Stash Artists! When you join, you'll get access to the full library of scrappy and stash-friendly patterns, including Friendly Wave and so many more.

Stitching my background together meant I could use some of the long strips of blue fabric that have been trimmed off quilt backs after quilting. Nowhere near all of them, of course, but it was a great way to use up some of them! I cut my strips anywhere from ¾" to 1 ¼" so I could get the maximum number of scrappy strips into my 16" cushion.

I probably should have used slightly lighter blues for the 'water' portion of the cushion, to help the whale stand out a little better, but I didn't think of that until after it was all pieced. When choosing the fabrics, I was more focused on making sure there was a lot of contrast between the water and the sky, so I had a moment of panic when I realized the dark grey tone-on-tone print I wanted to use for the whale was going to disappear more than I wanted. Fortunately, using lighter grey thread (Aurifil 2600) to quilt/stitch down the edge of the appliqué made it a lot more visible.

Real whale flukes (that's the proper name for their tails) have lots of bumps and ridges along the edge, so I replicated that as well as I could without making it too hard to cut out. I'm really pleased with the effect!

As usual, I had fun with the quilting. First, I stitched all around the whale several times to create a nice, thick line. When I'm stitching around appliqué shapes like this, I intentionally don't try to stitch exactly on top of the previous lines. That way the wobbles end up looking like they were supposed to happen, because they were! I don't know about you, but I could never stitch perfectly around an outline even once, let alone three times, so making the wobbles an intentional part of the design makes the process a lot more relaxing.

After the whale was stitched, I used the same Aurifil 2600 to stitch some splash detail where the tail is coming out of the water. I pretty much just scribbled elongated, overlapping figure-eights until it looked right.

For the water, I used Aurifil 2785 to quilt random, overlapping, wavy lines from side to side. This took the most time, but still didn't take long since it's such a small piece.

The clouds in the sky portion were Paul's idea. Random is hard! Did I quilt enough clouds? Are they close enough...far apart enough...properly cloud-shaped? 😅 After quilting a few, I told myself they were good enough and left it at that!

I put my cushion together with an envelope backing, which is the only method I've ever used for a cushion. For some reason, I can never remember which way to layer the pieces so the backing piece on the outside will be the one on the top, and this time I got it wrong. It looks so weird to me that the outside piece is on the bottom, like the cushion is upside down. It doesn't bother me enough that I took it apart to redo it, though!

A whale cushion definitely has to go to the beach for its photo shoot! Unfortunately, no real whales came to visit while we were there.

And thanks to Yvonne of Quilting Jetgirl, I've been trying to remember to take pictures of myself with my makes more often. The sun was really bright, so I'm squinting, but here's me and my Friendly Wave cushion 😊

We're not 'cushions on the couch' people, which is why I rarely make cushions. But at Christmas I had my Stay Cozy cushion displayed in our entryway, at the base of this table I made in shop class in junior high. After the Christmas decorations were put away, I decided the space needed a cushion for the rest of the year, too, and now Friendly Wave looks perfect there.

Dad carved the fabulous wood sprite sitting on the table. He also named this pattern, after I put a couple of options in the family group chat asking for opinions and he immediately chimed in with Friendly Wave. Apparently I need to get his help naming patterns more often!

Remember, you can join us in Stash Artists to get the Friendly Wave pattern and lots of other scrappy, stash-friendly patterns, along with monthly sewing sessions and more. We'd love to have you join us!

TGIFF and Sea Glass Star Quilt Top

Welcome to another Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday party 😊 I'm playing catch-up today and posting a quilt top that was finished back in April, but I hadn't taken pictures to be able to share it until now.

I'm doing a Mini of the Month pattern series in the Stash Artists membership this year and the May pattern was a fun one. Meet Sea Glass Star!

I combined a few different inspirations together to create this design:

1. People make art with actual sea glass, gluing the pieces to canvas or paper to create images, sometimes with the addition of painted or drawn lines. Scroll through this Pinterest search to see examples.

2. Ali of Exhausted Octopus makes beautiful sea glass quilts and teaches her method in a class (which I've never taken, so I'm not sure if my method is the same as hers). Her sea glass quilts tend to have a colour-wash effect and don't form an image.

3. The ticker tape-style quilts I've made in the past, like my Ticker Tape Heart Rainbow, creating a shape with square, rectangular, and triangular pieces of fabric.

Put all that together, shake it up a bit, add some hand embroidery, and you get my Sea Glass Star mini quilt.

I have a whole series of sea glass art mini quilts vying for attention in my head. They've been gathering for years while I worked on other things and I'm so happy I finally made the first one. I'm working on another one now for an event in the fall, and I'm really looking forward to sharing that when the time comes.

Believe it or not, I wasn't aiming for my Sea Glass Star to be blue. I tried about a dozen colour combinations in EQ8, but nothing really grabbed me until I tried the light, medium, and dark blues. That immediately had me nodding my head and pulling my blue scrap basket off the shelf. I shouldn't be surprised, since I really love my blues, but I swear I tried to use other colours!

I was happy to see I did have light, medium, and dark blue Aurifil 12 wt thread in my stash. I used 2720, 2735, and 2784 to embroider a simple backstitch to outline the sections of the star.

I ended up doing most of the embroidery while we were on the road, some of it while going to a surprise birthday party for my in-laws, who both turned 80 this spring, and some while going to move Zach out of his dorm room. I wasn't sure embroidery would work well as an on-the-road project, especially considering the dismal state of our roads, but it was perfect. 

Cutting the sea glass pieces was like doing a meditative puzzle. I worked on one section at a time, leaving the paper backing on the pieces until I had them all puzzled together to fill the section.

I used Lite Steam-a-Seam 2 for the fusible, which is slightly tacky, so after I peeled the paper backing off I finger pressed the pieces onto the background and that held them in place temporarily. Once all the pieces in the section were ready, I fused them down with my Oliso project iron.

For the medium and dark fabrics, I tried not to repeat a fabric in a section, but most of the fabrics are used in multiple sections. It was fun to use some of my really small scraps! My pieces range from ½" square(ish) to about 1" square(ish) and 1" x 1 ½" rectangle(ish). The fun thing about making fabric sea glass is there's no wrong shape since real sea glass comes in every possible shape. 

I've made a few blue quilts lately, though they haven't all made to it the blog yet, and my blue scrap basket is still overflowing. I guess I need to keep making blue quilts!

I'm looking forward to eventually quilting my Sea Glass Star. The question now is, when will I take the time to do that instead of chasing after the next shiny new project?

That's my recent(ish) finish! What have you finished lately? Link it up below and be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Skip Ahead Baby Quilt

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

I always love getting to make a new quilt, and I especially love it when I know the new quilt will be going to a new baby. When that new quilt will be going to a new baby whose parents actually use the quilts I've given them, it's even better! This Skip Ahead baby quilt will be going to a great-nephew due to arrive in a couple of months and I'm looking forward to seeing pictures of him on it.

Skip Ahead is the Stash Artists pattern for July and the pattern includes throw and queen sizes along with the baby size. I was debating which size to make because I really love making throw quilts, but then I remembered little man on the way and decided this was the perfect design for his quilt. And bonus, it used an off-cut piece of my Warm and Natural batting.

For a while I was calling the design Citrus and Blue, but I try not to reference the colours I used in the pattern names since most people probably won't choose the same colours. I do love the combination of citrus colours for the kite shaped blocks and the blues for the squares, but needed to come up with something else for the name. The name Skip Ahead comes from the diagonal paths created by the shapes and how it looks like we could skip along on the paths.

I chose to use all solid fabrics for the blue squares and all prints for the citrus colours. Some of the prints are pretty subtle, so they don't show up well in the pictures, but they're not solids.

The kite blocks are paper pieced, so I used freezer paper to make mine (of course!). I traced two templates and used them for all of the blocks. I love that the freezer paper templates are reusable! Learn more about the freezer paper technique in this on-demand workshop.

I knew right away that I wanted to quilt wishbones in the kite blocks. It's one of my favourite designs to quilt, especially in a shape that changes widths like this one. Wishbones are so forgiving - they don't have to be perfect to look good and they can be made any size to fit the shape you're trying to fill. They also work nicely to flow from one shape into another when you have a long line of connected blocks.

It took a bit longer to decide how to quilt the blue squares. I wanted something simple that would connect from block to block like the wishbones. I love when I can quilt a whole line across a quilt without needing to break the thread! Eventually I settled on a spiral that enters the block in one corner, spirals into the center, then back out, and exits the block in the opposite corner. I can guarantee you no two spirals are the same! Thankfully they still look good, even with the variations.

Then it was time to quilt the background. "Just quilt a good-size stipple," I told myself. That sounded like a good idea, especially since it would be quick for filling in all that space. Of course, I then proceeded to quilt a very dense stipple, which was not at all quick. Oops! My default is still to quilt very small, even when I'm intending to quilt larger. I do love how it looks, though, so that's good.

With the three different quilting designs, the texture on the back is amazing!

I chose three blue solids to use for a scrappy binding and I love how they frame the quilt without really drawing attention. I also love how the quilt looks with the ocean in the background 😊 We haven't seen any whales yet this summer, but hopefully that will change soon.

If you love scrappy, stash-friendly patterns, like Skip Ahead, and virtual sewing sessions with friends, join us in Stash Artists!

That's my finish, what have you finished lately? Link it up below and then be sure to visit some of the other quilters to celebrate their finishes, too.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

My First Quilt with Maude MacDonald

It's the last Friday in June, which means school is out and we officially have no children in high school anymore. That just blows my mind! Nathan says it hasn't really hit him because right now it just feels like any other last day of school. September will feel different for all of us, though, with him heading off to university and leaving just the two of us here at home.

It being the last Friday of the month also means it's time for another My First Quilt interview! This month my fellow Canadian, Maude MacDonald is sharing the story of her first quilt.

Maude MacDonald is a quilter, author, and designer who creates quilts and patterns, teaches people to trust their taste, and helps creative businesses find a look and voice that actually feels like them. She loves bold colour, old things, and doing things her own way - and believes perfection is vastly overrated while making things meant to be used, shared, and remembered.

You can connect with Maude at her website and on Instagram.

And now, here's Maude's first quilt! It's the first time we've featured someone whose first quilt was a t-shirt quilt!

What year did you make your first quilt? What prompted you to make it?

Winter 2018 - I needed a Christmas gift for my Dad & didn’t have a lot of money to spend.

What techniques were used in that first quilt? Did you quilt it yourself?

I guess it was traditional patchwork- I made my Dad a t shirt quilt with scissors, about 5 safety pins, no clue about interfacing or the process of quilting. I literally just went for it.

Who taught you to make the quilt?

Me and a hope and a dream lol

Are the colours you chose for your first quilt ones you would still choose today?

Oh no! This was a t shirt quilt made of mostly my Dad’s old NASCAR shirts. 

Did you fall in love with quilting right away? Or was there a gap between making the first quilt and the next one?

Well after this one I decided my stepmom needed a quilt for Christmas too, and that led me to the fabric store. After that my mom requested her own quilt and insisted I use a pattern which was a trip around the world, and with the combination of these three quilts I was hooked.

Where is the quilt now?

My Dad still uses it in the winter. It has wool batting so it’s really warm (I wasn’t aware at the time it was wool batting!) 

Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself as you made that first quilt?

Maybe a few structural things, like how to baste or even use a dang rotary cutter! But no- I went for it and completely discovered quilting accidentally and on my own and I think that’s how it was meant for me.

Anything else you want to share about your first quilt?

The first one, third, tenth even wasn’t perfect, but I had fun making every quilt I’ve made and they all are loved and used.

Thanks for sharing the story of your first quilt with us, Maude!