Contour Feather Mini Quilt

And I'm continuing with the parade of mini quilts.  I really did end up making quite a few mini quilts in about a two week window, so I've got a few more to post about. Today, I'm posting about this beautiful little feather mini quilt. 

I made this feather using the "Contour Feather" paper pieced pattern from Play Crafts.  You can find the free pattern here. While there are quite a few tiny pieces and even a "y" seam on this patter, it really was quite doable and I knocked out this feather mini quilt top in an afternoon. 

I've been quite fascinated by making a feather quilt for quite some time and I love the shape of this little feather.  I used a restrained color pallet of navy blue, teal blue, and golden yellow for the feather.  Thank goodness for an ever overflowing scrap bin from which I could pull all the colors I needed from.  I had just enough yarn dyed Essex Linen in Black left to use for the background.  The yarn dyed Essex Linen is seriously one of my favorite fabrics to use for a background fabric.  It has just the best subtle texture to it and I love that it isn't a truly solid color.  I think I need to order much more of this in my future!

For the quilting, I really wanted to just play with doing some free style straight lines in kind of a geometric framework.  I only marked on line across the face of the feather to get me started and then just sort of made it up as I went along.  Love love love how it turned out. :)

 I even went the extra bit and decided to hand bind this mini quilt.  Yes, it takes a bit longer (about an hour versus 5 minutes), but I'm trying to work on perfecting my hand binding skills and this was a good excuse to do just that. 

There is just so much that I really love about this mini quilt. I'm finding it really fun to just pour my favorites (color, fabrics, quilting textures, etc.) into a project and after seeing how well it has turned out, I think I'm going to try to continue to be more conscious to make projects that I truly love with materials that I truly love in a method that I truly love.  I think its a good way to continue to fuel my creative spark and passion. :)