Sails Mini Quilt

 

There are some patterns that come along that are just so beautiful and intriguing that they stick in your head and find a spot on the never shrinking wish list of things to make.  Well, the "Sails" paper piecing pattern by Daisy at Ants to Sugar was one of those patterns.  She first made her version back in September and I fell in love with it, yet I never had a good excuse to make myself one.  Well, I finally had an excuse to make one.  My mom's birthday is coming up, and she loves the cardinal place mats I made her for Christmas, but she wanted some more place mats that she could use when it wasn't Christmas or winter.  When she doesn't have all of her winter/Christmas decorations up, she decorates part of her house with lighthouses and nautical stuff.   When I started thinking about what to make her that would match her decor, instantly I thought of Daisy's "Sails" pattern.
I'm still sticking with the Sew My Stash 2015 challenge, so I dug through my stash and pulled out some fabric I like for the pattern, printed out the pattern and got to work.   

As you can see, I changed a bit of my initial fabric pull when I got to the water and boat part of the pattern and I'm glad I decided to make the change. 

I LOVE how this turned out.  Daisy's pattern is well written and although a bit time consuming, it was easy to follow and put the pieces together.  I especially love the way in which the sails are constructed because they have so much movement in them - you can almost see the wind pushing the sails out.
Well, anyways, at this point, as much as I love how this was turning out, it didn't quite look like my mom and I decided to go with something else for her which I think she will love.  Plus, I was crazy in love with this little mini quilt and part of me didn't want to let it go.  I quilted it up when I quilted the other place mats for my mom with a dense diamond grid pattern on it which just added so much great texture to this mini quilt.  

 So, I have this large canning jar that I though any left over/extra binding scraps into.  Since, this was just a mini quilt, I decided to poke around in my binding scrap jar to see if I had something long enough that would go with this mini quilt.  And I just so happened to have exactly enough dark brown binding for this mini.  The brown binding is perfect for this mini since I think it gives it a nice "framed" look.  

 I braved the sub-zero weather the other day to snag a few quick photos of it outside while the sun was actually shining.  It was COLD!  But these pictures are so worth it.