Monday, May 21, 2012

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Rainbow Star Mini Quilt

It's been a bit too long since I last posted, but I thought there's no better way to get back into blogging than through participating in Blogger's Quilt Festival!
I love looking at the hundreds of inspiring quilts!!


Today I'd like to show the mini quilt I completed for Leah as part of the Fab Little Quilt Swap through Flickr.




My swap partner said that she liked bright colours, rainbows and stars among other things. I came across this tutorial to paper piece 'Aunt Rachel's Star' block and auditioned a few different colour/rainbow variations:




And finally settled on this one:



Then the paper piecing began .... Each half square triangle block is less than 1 inch square.



Here's the star block all completed.




Prior to completing the block I had been weighing up whether I wanted to make
4 stars in different rainbow variations, but once I completed one block
I knew I wanted it to be the "star" of the quilt (pun intended ;-)
so I decided on a 3D rainbow pinwheel border to finish it off.



A close-up of one of the 3D pinwheels .....




I did a little bit of machine quilting in the ditch around the centre pinwheel, star and border. I then hand quilted it using DMC perle cotton size 8 in white. I echo quilted all of white half square triangles and then around the star and finally around each of the pinwheels. The hand quilting is nearly my favourite thing about this quilt - it gives it so much texture and I really love it!!




So here is a photo of it all finished, hanging out in my local park. It ended up being 20 inches square.




It was hard to give away because it was very much my style too, but I hope Leah is enjoying looking at it on her wall :)



Thanks so much for stopping by!!

I hope you go and check out more of the wonderful quilts linked up to Blogger's Quilt Festival.
A big thanks to Amy for putting it on again!!