Best Dressed Mini Quilt

This is a quilt I want to make over and over and over again! It's made using 2 1/2 inch squares. I used mini charms, five packs of them, but you could easily do this with any pre-cuts, or do some serious scrap busting.

The pattern comes with paper templates, which I love!  I cut them out, then tape them to the backside of a ruler. I align the paper on the fabric and cut the edge. I can cut about four+ fabric pieces at a time!

The fabric collection I chose is called Hazelwood by One Canoe Two.  There's a huge variety of prints and colors, and I love how some bows make me think of hair bows, while others remind me of bowties. It makes me think of a little group of Sunday School kids in their finest.

The quilt comes together fast, using a great technique called 2D chain piecing! 

Free motion quilting is something I'd like to practice more at.  I'm alright at walking foot quilting, I'm very good at dropping my quilts off at Violet Quilts for her longarm service ;) , but my free motion quilting skills could use some work!  This was free motion quilted with coral cotton thread. Every circle was stitched individually, no traveling.

To mark the circles, I used the clover blue disappearing marker, and traced around the base of a small thimble, then stitched all the circles.  Using a spring loaded free-motion foot.

The blue marker comes out with water. I found the steam on my iron wasn't enough to do it, so I spritzed it with a spray bottle and the marks disappeared immediately.

This was my first time using this disappearing marker. I will not admit to how many other marketing tools I have tried and not jived with!  I like this one! Since I don't want to prewash my fabrics, I may want to make sure that it's a pretty light spritz of water, so that I don't make the colours bleed before their first wash,(which didn't happen, but I would like to be cautious of that when using this method again) but it really did work successfully!

I backed it with some dear Stella fabric, and used a happy bundle of leftovers from other projects for a scrappy binding, my usual! I cut my binding at 2 1/2". If I'm going to finish my binding with handstitching, I cut it at 2 1/4", but with machine bindings I find 2 1/2" makes the most successful finish.

This mini quilt measures out at 23" x 28".  Adding a 6" border around it would make a perfect baby quilt, measuring 35" x 40"

Pattern is available as a free download Thursday June 15th through Friday June 16th 2017 for subscribing to our blog!  It will also be available after that in our Etsy shop!