Spring Fling Mini Quilt Swap

As the Schnitzel & Boo Mini Quilt Swap that I was a part of was wrapping up in January, I decided to sign up for another mini quilt swap since I had had so much fun making and being a part of the Schnitzel & Boo swap.  I signed up for a Spring Fling Mini Quilt swap that had a due date of mid-April.  After receiving my partner's information and thoroughly stalking her on Instagram, I noticed that she had included Megan Bohr of Canoe Ridge Creations Starshine quilt in several different mosaics she had posted for several different mini quilt swaps she was a part of - including the Spring Fling swap.  I love Megan's quilts and I jumped at the chance to re-create one of her gorgeous quilt designs into a mini-quilt for my partner. 

I decided to make 16 stars like in the original Starshine quilt, but shrunk them down to a finished size of just 6" each.  This made for some itty-bitty half square triangles in each block which I'm not a fan of.  Since I had recently learned how to foundation paper piece, I pulled out my ruler and pencil and drew up a paper piecing template for the stars. 

For the fabric selection, I wanted to keep the rainbow affect of the original Starshine quilt.  However, not wanting to buy 16 different pieces of solid fabrics (my solids stash is kind of small and lacking in color), I decided to utilize a fat quarter bundle of Kona Cotton's newest 32 colors which I had won last fall.  After playing around with the colors for a while, I finally manged to come up with a palate that I liked and I thought my partner would like also.

Assembly began, but it was slow going!  Each star had 8 smaller paper pieced units and when you multiply that by 16 stars - that's 128 units to sew together and trim!  yikes!  Thankfully, I landed on my idea fairly quickly at the beginning of the swap so I had a little more than 2 months to work on the quilt.

I did start with a test block to make sure everything worked, and happily my math and engineering skills didn't fail me.  I later incorporated that test block into the back of the quilt. 

Even though this quilt only finished at around 30 inches square, it was probably one of the most labor intensive and time consuming quilts I've ever worked on. 

But I love how it turned out, and it was well work the effort. Just as the quilt I made for my first swap was really hard to part with, this quilt was equally as hard to part with. 

To finish up this quilt, I decided to go with some spiral quilting starting at the center of the quilt.  It's one of those quilting techniques which looks hard, but once you get the spiral started, its really pretty easy since I just let one side of my walking foot simply follow along the previous quilting.  Also, I love how spiral quilting gives a quilt a beautiful modern look without being overly complicated. 

I ended up going with a solid black binding for the quilt to give it a framed look since it is meant to be a wall hanging quilt.  Surprisingly, I finished this mini quilt with 2 weeks to spare!  Thankfully, the sun did come out and the weather was beautiful the Sunday before I had to ship it which meant I was able to take this quilt to a local park for some proper photographs while my husband watched the boys during naptime.  Finally, it was time to send this beautiful little quilt off to it's new home.  I added in a few extra goodies when I packed it all up.  

 

My partner received it and was thrilled!!  Can't ask for more than that :)