Saturday, April 16, 2011

Something from nothing

Victoria from Bumblebeans and Fifteen Minutes of Play has organized a swap of 12 inch mini-quilts made from scraps.  I had a lot of fun making mine (except for the part where I had to unquilt my free motion quilting because it was so jerky! More on that later.)  I took pictures along the way to show you how I made my block.
I started by sewing random scraps together to make an 8” square.  I cut a matching square from yellow solid fabric left from my rainbow quilt.

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I sewed the two squares together right sides together around all four sides and then cut along both diagonals.

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I ended up with four half-square triangles.

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I played with them in a few different configurations.

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I liked the pinwheel the best so I sewed them together.

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Next, I needed borders.  I looked at the colors in my made fabric and decided to go with the turquoise colors.  I found more scraps to sew into borders and attached them to all four sides.

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The back of the little mini-quilt could easily have been one piece of fabric but what fun is that?  So I sewed another scrap fabric and it looked like a little house to me, so I made some scrappy sky to go with it.

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Then came the quilting.  I love the look of spiral quilting!  I tried it with the walking foot and it was very difficult to do the center of the quilt.  So I ripped it out and tried again with the free motion foot.  The center was definitely better but the outer circles were very choppy.  So, after some debate, I decided to rip out most of the spiral and leave the center intact.  Then I used the walking foot to finish the larger part of the spiral.  This was much smoother (although I can’t imagine doing it on a larger quilt!).  I love the texture.
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I used some of my trusty black dot binding to finish it off. I sewed it on by machine and then finished the back by hand.  I am very happy with it now.  It isn’t due for another three or four weeks so I have some time to get some other goodies together.  I can’t wait to see the rest of the mini-quilts!  Click over to the Flickr group to see who has posted so far.

Photobucket

5 comments:

  1. Very cute quilt! Like the bright colors!

    found you through the Sew Darn Crafty link, so I hope you'll come visit me soon!

    Tanya

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  2. Very clever! Love the circular quilting.

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  3. What fabulous craziness! Thanks for linking to Quiltstory!

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  4. I like the spiral quilting - I'll have to try that someday too ;)

    www.sewrayme.co.uk

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