Rainbow Arrows Mini Quilt

For today's installment of "Maggie makes a million mini quilts and turns her bedroom into a padded room", I'm showing off the Rainbow Arrows Mini Quilt I made. 

I've always been fascinated by and in love with rainbowey quilts and I've even made a rainbowey mini quilt (which I gave away...) and some rainbowey quilt blocks for a charity project, and other than this mini quilt that I made, I don't have a rainbowey quilt that I've made just for myself, just for the love of rainbow ordered colors, and just because I wanted to.  A while ago, I came across these arrows on Pinterest, and I've been wanting to make similar arrows but with ranbowey tail feathers.  I used the tutorial that Carla of Grace and Favour posted as a starting point for how to construct the arrows. 

 And then I just sort of made up the rest. hehe  I intended to make only one arrow, but it was late at night and I wasn't paying attention when I sew together my second strip set for the opposite tail feather portion and yeah... lets just say, I ended up making a duplicate instead of a mirror strip set.  Thanks to the suggestion of a fellow quilter on Instagram, I decided to use it as an excuse to make 2 arrows instead of just the one. :)

Sometimes, it's nice when a mistake turns into a lovely design decision.  See - two arrows looks so much better than just one would have looked! 

 

 Everything about how this quilt was turning out had me all starry eyed and I knew that I had to take some time and do something a little extra special for the quilting.  Hence, I ended up combining straight line quilting and free motion quilting for this mini quilt.  I outline the arrow, added straight lines to the arrow head and the tail feathers and gave the background a tight stripple free motion quilting treatment.  When I was all done quilting this mini quilt, there was definitely a moment of pride an accomplishment because I usually don't push myself to get so creative and take chances with intricate quilting.  I'm really glad I did. 

 This rainbowey arrow mini quilt is totally my favorite quilt right now - I mean I love all my quilts, but something about this one is just a little extra special.  I think it'll be a favorite for quite some time to come too - I get all the good feels when I look at this one hanging on my bedroom wall.