Sea Breeze Mini Quilt Along
Hello! We are up to day four of the quilt along and I am loving all the beautiful quilts being made! I’m chuffed to be one half of today’s stops on the blog hop – be sure to also see what Penny at Happy Spider Knits Podcasts is sharing today as the other half of the day four hop stop.
I love quiltalongs and group projects – they are a fun and social way to be creative, but I also enjoy the challenge of putting my own spin on it, and watching how one base project can turn out so differently across the group. For this mini-quilt, I’ve been turning over colour placement in my mind ever since I decided to join in the quilt-along. After downloading the (very cute) pattern, one of the first things that jumped out at me were the secondary patterns forms by the white HSTs, and I wanted to play around with that, with the idea of making the stars in the top right and bottom left stand out. My current plan looks a little like this:
I created this little template in Illustrator, and then brought it into photoshop and played with colours until I ended up with a layout I’m happy with – because I’m an improviser like that, since I don’t have EQ7 which seems to be the rage for quilt design. For those who would like to play with colour in photoshop, or even with good old paper and coloured pencils, a 4.5″ version of this jpeg without colour can be found here.
I think I’m happy with that layout. Enough so, anyway, that I’ve now got some lovely little piles of squares ready to start pulling it all together over the weekend, though I’m not 100% certain what will happen once I start piecing and playing and overthinking (me? overthink it? NEVER!). My quilt is going to be a wall hanging for my children’s toy room, which made fabric shopping both easier and harder. Easy in that I knew where to start my search, but hard because I’m a fusspot and was trying to match as closely as possible. In the end, the best green was only available as a single fat quarter, so I bought both it and a backup. Thankfully, the fat quarter turned out to be enough.
If you are thinking the big squares look a lot bigger than they should, compared to the smaller cornerstones, you are right – where the pattern called for 3.5″ squares to make the HST with, I have gone up to 4″ squares. Aside from the green, I have oodles of the other fabrics, and so decided to give myself plenty of wiggle room, and then come back and trim them all back to size, for the sake of accuracy.
My plan of attack is to do everything in batches, and it should come together nice and quickly. I’m intending to machine quilt most of it, with maybe some hand quilting features, and finishing it off with either the red or blue as the binding – I’m a decide-the-binding-at-the-end kind of quilter. I’ll be working on getting it finished over the weekend, and will be sharing sneaky peeks on my Instagram feed.
Have you been hopping along? Tomorrow, you can find more mini quilt goodness with Melissa at Ms Midge. New to the quiltalong? Get all the details at GnomeAngel, and check out the day two and three bloggers and instagrammers.
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Love this idea! Can’t wait to see it all come together! 🙂
Thanks – me too! It’s to be my weekend project. Thanks for hosting xx
Such a clever approach! Love the focus on the stars 🙂
Thanks! I can’t help but tweak things a bit 😉 hopefully it will look as nice once I have it sewn up – either that or I’ll be doing some shuffling!
This looks fantastic, you’re so clever creating a printable! And I just love the secondary patterns you have created. I ll be making more of these!
Thank you! I loved your IG sewalong yesterday, your mini looks fabulous. It’s a great little pattern isn’t it?
It’s going to look great, I love your idea of bringing out the secondary patterns
Thank you! It’s been fun to play with the layout to add my own spin to it.
this is so fun – can’t wait to see your mini 🙂 even though I have EQ I still use the pencils and p
I’m a tactile person, so the old-fashioned way appeals to me 🙂
Looks good Rach! Thinking, thinking, thinking about my fabrics! Looking like a weekend project here too!
Better hurry! We’ll keep each other on track, ok?
Loving the different patterns with your colour placement. So many different options. Really excited to see them all done.
They are all looking fabulous, and so different! Thanks for stopping by.
Why am I feeling the desire to download the pattern and make a rainbow one for the wall of the playroom?
doooooooo it #enabler
So amazed at all the different versions of what is essentially a simple pattern. Your is lovely.