Mini Quilt Swap

Hello again! Anyone still out there?? I am attempting to blog once a week, and have a backlog of old projects I would also like to catch up on, so this is the first one. Wish me luck, and thanks for reading!

Original inspiration fabrics

This past winter (whoa, where has the time gone??) I signed up for my second "mini quilt swap" on Instagram. This one was hosted by someone name SchnitzelandBoo and seems to have a lot of people participating! You get a partner and look through their Instagram account to get a feel for what they like, and then you make and send them a gift. Your partner is a secret, and it's actually a lot of fun!

I pulled the above fabrics to start with, and then stared at them for a few weeks. I really wanted to use the top one, which is a Nani Iro double gauze with cool neon dots, but I didn't have a plan other than that. 

Starting

After looking through my partner's photos I thought I would do something that was somewhat star shaped, had a white background, and used aqua. I found a paper-piecing pattern called "Celestial Star" from a shop called From Blank Pages. It's a cool block because depending on how you lay out the colors it can look really, really different. You can check out lots of examples on Instagram with #celestialstarqal. I eventually decided on this layout, but it wasn't easy!

Waiting to be quilted

The block is made up of 12 triangles that each contain 10-12 pieces so it is a lot to keep track of! It helped to use the coloring guide and cut out everything ahead of time, rather than cut as I go, which I occasionally do with paper piecing, even though it creates more waste I think.

Quilted

I used straight-line quilting to echo some of the shapes but kept it simple for the most part. I used aqua thread so it would stand out a little bit more.

FInished!

I used an older Anna Maria Horner print for the binding, and I really like it because although it has colors that arent in the quilt it still matches, or at least coordinates ( at least I think it does!). I must say that paper piecing can be really fun, and it can also be really tedious! I have to be in the right mood to do it, but I could never make enough of these blocks to equal a whole quilt. Yikes. That would be so many pieces of fabric!! But I am working on a much more simpler paper-piecing project for a large quilt for myself (when I have extra time, which is so far not at all), so we'll see how that one goes!

I have one more mini that I am finishing up for a Cotton and Steel swap, which now that I think about it also involves aqua, a circle, and white, but ah well!