Textures

I had another DREAMi moment this past week while I was waiting for my "Better At the Lake" Desire to Inspire challenge fabric to arrive....  DRop Everything And Make it...'

It's not crooked or wonky; it's perfectly square but the wild grass and weeds in the lot beside us make for a not-flat setting!

If this pattern looks a little familiar to you, hooray! You're right! It's my Blue Skies & Sunny Days pattern here or click the sidebar button in my pattern store.  Until midnight tomorrow it is on sale for just $5.

But it's a little different:  it's a mini!!  It measures just 20" square!  It was another good exercise in quilt math, reducing a larger block to half size.  You betcha, there will be a future post on how to do that correctly; I learned the hard way with the centre block for the Mini Round Robin I'm in.

Completed flimsy

Do you see a mistake in the flimsy? I didn't until I had started ditch-stitching...  Look in the lower left corner in the above photo.

On the right, you can see the lemon plaid block in the top corner should have been rotated 180 degrees. On the left is how things looked once I'd unpicked it

It's now fixed. Phew!  Had to unpick it or it would have driven me nuts.

The back - all fabric from the Textures line

It uses scraps from my Summer Breeze quilt, (ha, that post is almost exactly 2 years ago) all Angela Walters fabrics by Art Gallery Fabrics.  The majority are from her Textures line, with a couple from her Legacy line.

I experimented with using all three greys for the background and paid little attention to how they fell within each block.  Yup, that made me a little twitchy.

I did the Blue Skies pattern, as in a square quilt, but used the Sunny Days construction method.  The pattern gives you both sizes and both construction methods, one using nothing but strips, the other strips and yardage which results in less seams and therefore less thread and fabric.

Label applied using Lara's Crafted Appliqué technique - that link takes you to her current giveaway which ends tomorrow, and entails revisitng all the hops but not the CA blog hop post!  She is having you visit a new post from each of the bloggers so you see what else they get up to. Such a great, and typically sweet and generous Lara, idea.

With the variety of quilting, I thought the name Textures was à propos for this little quilt.  My good friend Tish, partner in crime, now partner in birthing a new male quilter, put me onto the idea of Plexiglas.  On one of his many trips to Lowe's, I got MacGyver to pick me up a piece of it; it measures 28X30".  I grabbed a pack of erasable markers and an eraser at Staples, and tried it out on this little quilt.  It is an awesome tool to have added to my quilting supplies!

Pre-binding, but post-quilting since I forgot to take a pic of the Plexiglas drawings before quilting

Because there were several greys and because the colours weren't all in one colour family or as much of a contrast to the background as both of the original quilts, I wanted to created that strong diagonal movement but I wanted to change it up from the feathers.  I used Angela's Signature design from her first Shape By Shape book.  I did it on the Crazy Hearts mini (see below) and loved it.  Fun to do, awesome to look at and pet ;-)

In the coloured sections I alternated between a really cool way of doing double pebbles that I saw Natalia Bonner do in a video, and back and forth lines which were inspired by the plaid fabrics in the quilt. I was going to go back and do a few random horizontal lines, but I liked the look of the back and forth, and LOVED doing it with the FMQ foot, so fast, so freeing and not perfect.

Another of Tish's influences on me: Susie's Magic Binding again

Here it is in the shade on the patio.  I did Susie's Magic Binding, here, which gives you a flanged binding entirely done most effectively by machine.  I did this one narrower than she calls for; I prefer 2.25" binding, and hers gives you a 2.75" one which is way too wide IMHO for a mini.  I cut the main one at 1.25" and the flange at 1.5" in case you want to do this too.

What in the world? you may be wondering.  After the patio shot, I turned to go back into the house, and thought you might be interested to see the pet ramp we now have off the patio doors, since Rocco is not allowed to do any stairs.  We, well, MacGyver, who am I kidding, glued pieces of an old yoga mat onto it to give it a better grip.  Notice  another fur kid peeking out the screen?!

Went inside, downstairs to my sewing corner and pinned the new mini to my wall, er vapour barrier of minis.  They are all right around the 20" size, and all have Susie's binding :-)  From left to right: Crazy Hearts, Swoon Mini and Textures

I love them! I purposely set Textures a little lower than Crazy Hearts, might have to make it more obviously lower...And I just noticed, when I found the post for Crazy Hearts, that I have some of the Textures grey plaid in the low volume background of it!  Cool.

Interesting:  when I wrote about Crazy Hearts, Craftsy had a classes sale on, and if you notice the sidebar button, you'll see they are doing a pretty sweet one this weekend.  All classes, yep every single one, are 50% off and some are even more, at $19.99.  This is the time to pick one up; I know that's when I got my Angela classes, and I have put them to good use over and over.  Free Motion Quilting Negative Space is a great one, as is Machine Quilting: Small Changes, Big Variety.  She uses both a domestic and a longarm in these classes.  I have done these quilting designs on my longarm as well as on my Bernina.

One last outdoor shot.

Quilt Stats:
Pattern:  original design, mini based on my Blue Skies & Sunny Days pattern
Size: 20" square
Fabric: scraps
Batting: franken-batted Warm 'n Natural 100% cotton
Quilted: on my Bernina
Threads: pieced and quilted with Aurifil #2600 and 2123, fabulous threads, no breakage, no tension issues whatsoever; from piecing to quilting, I adjusted nothing.

Aurifil thread with what's left of the fabric; note some pieced scraps to become part of my Scrap Vortex quilt

Linking up with the three C's:
Crazy Mom Quilts
Confession of a Fabric Addict
Cooking Up Quilts

Lake Erie as seen on my walk this sweltering morning of the fishflies' arrival, ahhh and aackk-- speaking of lakes, I will be blogging less and concentrating efforts on sewing my challenge "Better At The Lake" fabric from Henry Glass Fabrics, so exciting! AND doing the first round on Cindy's centre block of course ;-)