Stories from the Sewing Room

Welcome to this special edition post. My goal this month was to make the Macaws mini quilt. This is a kit I bought (on clearance) from Quilty Box and included the pattern booklet with Elizabeth Hartman's instructions and a kit from her fabric line to make the top and binding. Here's how it looked at the beginning of the month.

And here it is all finished!

Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal - February Finish Link-up

This quilt went together surprisingly fast. The only stumbling block I had was when aligning the blocks top to bottom around the perch. A seam ripper and some pinning took care of that. 

I have a love-hate relationship with the woven fabrics in the kit. Cotton fabrics are considered to be woven fabrics, but I am referring to the more solid-looking colors that have a tablecloth-like texture. I like how they look, but I found them to be very thin and stretchy. I wonder how they would hold up long-term in a heavily used quilt because they are so thin and loosely woven. For a wall quilt they are fine.

These are not my usual colors at all, particularly the greenish-yellows in the middle bird. I would never purchase that color on my own. I had a lot of leftovers from the top, so I decided to use a more improv-style piecing technique for the backing to use up the fabric. All of the half-square triangles are trimmings from the front. I like how the striped HST came out (the ones in between the green and orange wovens in the top row). They look really cool in my opinion. 

I also like the three 1" HST because they are so tiny. Also, since it was the back, I didn't worry about keeping it super straight. Trying to embrace the improv thing.

Thanks to Kelly from My Quilt Infatuation for giving me courage to try scrappy improv and my friend Jodie, who happened to mention the other day that me suggesting using the HST cutoffs right away was some of the best quilting advice she ever received. I was really touched by that. I do always sew my cut off HST right away (like leaders and enders), but unlike Jodie, I am not good at using them right away (or ever). Jodie also makes really fun backs for all her quilts, so I thought about her a lot while creating this. 

I used the Faux Free Motion design from Quiltable to quilt my mini. I LOVE quilting mini quilts on the long arm. So satisfying. I didn't have enough fabric to get the overage top to bottom that I needed to attach the backing to the rails, so I basted 5" strips to the top and bottom. I do keep 12" strips that I use when people give me too small backing, but they are sized for big quilts. I have a long-term project that uses 5" squares, so that is why I cut 5" strips. When I was done, I removed the strips, pressed them, and cut them into the 5" squares I needed for the other project. Sometimes I am clever. 😏

This is my favorite bird.