Part 1 Finished! (Sort of…)

I finally finished part 1 of My Small World Quilt! It is a very fun, albeit a VERY challenging quilt to make. It involves a lot of template piecing, which I struggled with. I used the freezer paper method and even though I traced the shapes very carefully and added in the necessary seam allowances, some of the mini blocks still came out too small. I am still not sure what I did wrong…

I didn’t let that stop me, though. I started making blocks the traditional way (like the pinwheel blocks) and then trimmed them down to the correct size. Apparently my math skills are not quite up to par because the sections still didn’t come out right, so I had to add in some fabric strips in places so the blocks would fit together:

I really wish they would offer a class on Craftsy called “Quilter’s Math for Dummies”…. I would totally pay $29.99 for that 🙂

And on the last block shown here I just totally went in my own direction and did some improv piecing!

Overall, I am very happy with how it turned out, despite the mistakes. I am planning on using this as a wall hanging, so originally I was going to use a lot of solids, neutrals and a subdued color scheme. But I kept gravitating towards all of the bright, fun colors in my stash so in the end I just went with my instincts. Verykerryberry has a good tip on her blog where she says that she only pulls out the fabric for one mini block at a time. This is great advice because you could easily drive yourself mad by over-thinking everything. I pulled out fabrics for a few blocks at a time so I could make sure I had a good balance. It is very time consuming to have to hand select each and every tiny piece, but I’m glad I did it that way because I like my balance of bright colors with pops of black and white added in.

I’m going to take a couple of days off from this quilt to work on some smaller projects (and get some long neglected housecleaning done!) It was easy to get obsessed with this quilt and there was a day I spent 10 hours working on it! I need to work on my Mad Stars quilt and I would also like to make a mini quilt and use a technique for magic binding that I learned at the Modern Quilt Guild meeting on Wednesday.

Speaking of which, if you have been following my blog you know that I was debating about going to the meeting and bringing my Small World quilt along for the show and tell. I’m so glad I did! I have been trying to attend one of their meetings since last summer but something always comes up on meeting days. Finally this past Wednesday I was able to attend for the first time and I brought my show and tell piece along. I was kind of nervous about showing my work to a group of people I have never met before (and let me tell you, there are a lot of talented quilters in this group! One is going to be teaching at QuiltCon next year!). But everyone was so nice about it and it was a good ice breaker. It seems like a fun group and I am looking forward to participating and getting to know everyone.

Linking up to Finish it Up Friday at crazymomquilts.BlogSpot.com and also, since I am thankful for getting through part 1 of this pattern I am linking up to Thankful Thursday on quiltingjetgirl.com