Hooked on Needles

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Tranquility Mini Quilt

This year so far I have signed up for a few swaps and have fulfilled most of them by sending the appropriate number of fabric squares in the specified colors. Those are the easy swaps that net a great variety of fabric squares to make all sorts of fun things with. My two rainbow quilts shown HERE and HERE, my I Spy quilts shown HERE and HERE, my red and aqua quilt shown HERE, and a few other projects I have done were made with swap fabrics.

The swap I am working on right now is a little more involved. It's the New Beginnings Mini Quilt Swap that I mentioned HERE. I have never made a mini quilt...well, that might not be entirely true now that I think of it. I suppose you could call mug rugs, table runners and wall hangings mini quilts, right? I've made a few of those, pictured HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

Well anyway, I have begun my mini quilt for this swap and wanted to share with you the process as I go along. So here goes...



Tranquility Mini QuiltAlong with the name of my swap partner, I was also given other vital information about her such as her website address. I used that information to determine that she seems to like warm fall-like colors. So I chose a charm pack of Tranquility by Sandy Gervais as my fabric. You may recall that I made a full size quilt using that same fabric last fall and gave it to my sister for Christmas. You can see it HERE.

This being a mini quilt swap, of course I had to cut down the size of the charm squares so I took each one of the 48 squares and cut a 2-inch strip from it and then cut 2 2-inch squares from each strip. So now I have 96 2-inch squares. The remains of each charm square will be saved for another project.



Tranquility Mini QuiltI thought long and hard about a design for this mini quilt. At first I thought I would do an appliqué picture of some sort. Then I thought perhaps I would take a standard quilt block and make that the center of the mini quilt and then add some extra piecing around it to finish it off. But then I had the idea to make a regular quilt design, only in miniature. What an inspiration! And what better design to use than my own! So I did a little figuring and drawing and discovered that I could make a super fun mini quilt using my Rainbow Quilt pattern, 2-inch print squares and 1-inch solid strips. The squares will finish to 1 1/2 inches and the strips will finish to 1/2 inch.

I am going to make this mini quilt nine squares by nine squares and then add a small solid border around the outside edge, making the finished size somewhere around 20 or 21 inches square. I will use the leftover blocks to piece into the backing, just like I do on my full size quilts. You can see pictures of how I piece leftover blocks into a backing HERE. The backing and binding fabric will be the same fabric as the binding on the big Tranquility quilt I made for my sister.

I'm so excited to get started sewing on this project. It will be something like going from making clothing for myself to making clothing for my kids -- big difference in size! I think it will be fun! So stay tuned for more updates as I go along. I'll keep my camera handy so I can share the whole process with you.

Happy Stitching!

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1 Comments:

  • Oh, this will be lovely and I'm sure much loved by the lucky gal receiving it. I'm working on mine right now too and having great fun. Not my own design, but will add to it as the tutorial I'm using is just a bit small. I hope to have a post up this weekend of my work in progress.

    By Blogger A Plain Path, At February 17, 2012 at 8:22 AM  

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