Thursday, March 31, 2016

Finished Quilt: My Small World

I finished!

finished My Small World

My Small World--quilt pattern by Jen Kingwell, this one made and quilted by me. 53"x33".

This was a big project. I started sewing it in May 2015 and finished it earlier this week. I kept track of my quilting time--8 hours and 25 minutes of machine quilting, and 95 minutes of hand quilting. The orange peel blocks and the two appliqued circles in section 2 are the only parts that I hand quilted.
My Small World detail3

The back of the quilt is made of mostly fat eighths of a Momo fabric bundle I bought a while back.
My Small World Back


Overall, I'm happy with it. I'm also tired of it and maybe will be more enthusiastic about it after some time not working on it or having it in my list of ongoing projects. There are a few places where I don't love my fabric choices and also a couple parts of the quilting that didn't come out as well as I'd hoped.

But. I love a lot about it. I like the sky and the green background on the left side. I love how section 5 turned out. (All rainbows and sunny with the hexagons, dresden block, rainbow, and New York Beauty.) I'm very happy with almost all of the machine quilting. I feel like I learned and improved my needle turned applique skills. And I improved my fabric selection over time as I made the different sections of the quilt. Scale and value are really important when working on such small pieces.

Just so you know, the only place where I didn't follow the pattern is the 4"x2" heart in section 2. I made that heart back in the year 2001 when I was just a baby quilter. It was an extra leftover from my flag/star mini quilt, which was probably my first mini quilt ever. 

Most of the binding pieces are from my binding scrap rolls. I cut 2 new pieces for binding the sky section.
I'm so happy to have this quilt done, and I'm planning on getting it up on my front room wall really soon. 


This quilt is one of two items I completed from my Q1 Finish-Along blog post. It feels good to get long term projects finished!