Mini quilt for April

I was so excited today when a friend of mine said she would be coming to visit to go out to lunch.  I haven't seen her in what feels like forever since I have been kinda home bound since a knee surgery in October.

So since I was so happy she was making the hour drive to see me I decided to make her something super cute and fun and quick.  And what is better than a mini quilt?




I began by dumping out a box of my stash and digging through to find some small pieces that I could use.





 I decided to make it similar to a string quilt.  I grabbed some fabrics and said to myself that no matter what I was just going to grab and sew and not worry about what fabrics were places next to each other (this was so hard for me!). But as luck would have it, it looked pretty awesome when I pressed it.

I then trimmed it to square it up and dug through my scraps and came up with some pieces to make the sashing.  At first I wasn't planning on making one, but decided that it needed it to frame out the fun block.



I didn't put too much thought into the backing and in hindsight I would change what I used, but I chose to piece together some scraps.  I then used a scrap of warm and natural for the batting. I pin basted it and went to quickly do some quilting on it.

 I stitched in the ditch around the inside of the border and then randomly across the center following the seams of the fabrics.  I then stitched one presser foot width from the seam of the border on the cream fabric.  I feel that it really framed out the fun center.

Then I grabbed a strip of fabric that I had in my scrap box.  I tend to cut leftover fabrics down to 2.5 inch strips so they are ready when I do my strippy scrap quilt that I will one day make, which makes the perfect size for binding.  I grabbed a really fun purple piece and made up my binding.  I quickly machine stitched it on the back, folding it over and machine stitched it to the front.

Over all this was a super simple fun project that took about an hour to complete.  The finished size is 10.5" by 8" which makes a good large mug rug or trivet.  I love how the random sewing of the fabrics came out and the colors are so me.  (Which I guess is good cause they are out of my scrap box!)  Next time, I will think about the backing a little bit more, but I am happy with how it turned out.  I may need to make myself one now.