Mini Randoms

A few months back I made this mini spool quilt with leftover sample blocks from my Modern Patchwork Techniques 1 and 2 evening classes. As I am doing a new ‘Modern Sampler’ class this year I can use all my old class samples up (something I have been dying to do since I made them!).
So here are some mini quilts made with random, and not so random, patchwork.
First up is the one I think has been most successful, Random Drunk Beauty.

There’s a few drunkards paths, a quarter of a New York Beauty and the porthole block I made in Lu’s class at FQR 2012 here.
I really loved putting this together, just ‘playing with fabric’ for an hour or so. I pieced these a week or so before I attended FQ retreat this year and Lu’s Improv Class, and in many ways this was a very similar approach. Except in Lu’s class we were making all the different elements from scratch, whereas here I already had them, but had to fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

This one’s a bit more straight forward, 4 star blocks and some borders. I quilted all 3 of these last week and got them bound just in time to hang them in our exhibition. I had said (back in February when I was filling in the form for the Fringe brochure) that we would have some items to sell, thinking some of the participants might want to sell stuff. However only one person was willing to part with anything, so I thought I better make a few minis to sell!

This one is called Random Single Double – half a (failed) single girl block and half a double wedding ring. This one isn’t quite as successful, but it has such pretty fabric that it’s still aesthetic enough for me to display. I had quite a job deciding which way up it should hang, if you rotate to the left it looks like a weird face!

Seeing as I waited till after FQR to quilt these, I could try out some of Trudi’s tips from her excellent FMQ class. Trudi is all about splitting the quilt up into different sections and using different FMQ patterns in each.
That’s what I tried to do here, and it’s not bad, but still plenty of room for improvement!

One of the fun things about doing these minis has been trying out different quilting techniques on each (without committing to a full sized quilt). I have long wanted to try the coiling circles pattern that I used on the top quilt. I think it looks very effective but has made the edges a little curly. And for the stars I used a grid worked on the horizontal – all great practice!
Next post will be a preview of our exhibition (now up and running). So if you’ve ever swapped with, or contributed to a bee quilt with a Scottish Blogger you may find your work is in our exhibition too!