Shining Softly Quilt

Welcome to another TGIFF party! And if you're thinking, "Gee, Leanne has hosted TGIFF twice already this month" you'd be correct 😆 As one of three TGIFF managers (along with Laura and Anja), I take care of making sure the linky party runs smoothly during January, which means stepping up to host when there's no other host signed up. If you blog and you'd like to host the party, there are plenty of open spaces in 2026 and we'd love to have you! You can sign up here (hosting is really easy, I promise!).

And now on with the party! This week I'm sharing the quilt that was actually my last finish of 2025, and the Stash Artists pattern for January, Shining Softly.

Don't ask me why, but in my head Friendship Star blocks have a 'correct' way to lean (to the right, if you're wondering), so having them purposely lean in both directions felt very odd to me. But I love the jewel shape that creates in the space between the stars!

As always, I had fun digging into my stash for the right fabrics for my stars. I did have to buy a few, though, because I didn't have enough pink or purple blenders to not repeat any. Oh darn, right?

I coloured this design a lot of different ways on my computer before I settled on the one I actually wanted to make. While I'm not a huge lime green fan, I feel like it really makes this colour palette sing. And having the colours run diagonally is so much more interesting than if they went straight across.

While I was piecing the stars and assembling the top, I wavered back and forth about how to quilt it. Part of me wanted to do something to highlight the shapes in the negative space, but I couldn't decide what. Another part of me wanted to quilt something swirly to emphasize the way the stars seem to be dancing across the quilt. As you can see, the swirly part of me won. I used Aurifil 1125 50 wt for all of the piecing and the quilting.

I was kind of obsessed with how the sun being low in the sky really made the quilting texture stand out.

I took these pictures the same day I took the pictures of Thread Love, which meant it was a snowshoes-required kind of photo shoot. Since then, we've had even more snow! It's several feet deep in our backyard now, and there's more in the forecast for tonight. It just keep coming!

If you love stash-friendly patterns like Shining Softly, come join us in Stash Artists! We're doing a Mini of the Month series in 2026 along with what I'm calling our 'main' patterns every other month, plus we get together virtually to sew every month. We'd love to welcome you into the community 💖

Now it's your turn! What have you finished recently? Link it up below and be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too 😊

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Thread Love Mini Quilt

I'm happy to finally get to share my Thread Love mini quilt with you! For 2026, I'm doing a Mini of the Month series in the Stash Artists membership and Thread Love is our first mini quilt pattern.

When quilters first started raving about Aurifil, I avoided trying it for a couple of years. I knew people seemed to really love it, but I also knew I wouldn't be able to get it at my local quilt shop, which meant I'd have to think ahead enough to order it before I actually needed it. Then I won a small spool (it was 1231, Spring Green, if I remember correctly). I held onto that little spool for a while, before finally breaking down and trying it. As a suspected I would, I loved it and started making the switch away from the Gutermann polyester thread I had been using up to then (and could buy at a little shop within walking distance of my house). It has been the only thread I use for years now, for piecing and quilting, by hand and by machine, though I still can't buy it locally and have to remember to think ahead to order what I need. I've also been known to send Aiden to East Coast Quilt Co. in St. John's before he comes home, so he can bring thread with him. All of that to say that, even though I'm not a big fan of the colour orange, I still had to make my spools Aurifil orange. 

I had so much fun choosing fabrics for my 'thread'! My go-to colour palette these days seems to be pinks, purples, and teals; those colours have been together in Inner Beauty, my quilting tattoo, and two quilts I've been working on over the past few days. In Thread Love, the pinks, purples, and teals really pop against the navy background and the orange spools are another kind of pop.

Since no quilter ever has all new spools of thread, I included full spools and partial spools in the design.

For the quilting, I decided to outline each spool twice, then I quilted a dense loopy meander all over the background. The spools aren't quilted, so they stand out nicely. As always, the quilting is especially noticeable on the solid pink back.

I think this one will eventually go on my sewing room wall. I have one long wall that is still almost completely bare that I want to use for mini quilts, but first I want to add the word 'CREATE'. I haven't decided yet how I want to do the word (Wood letters? Painted directly on the wall? Something else?), so while I've pondered that for a couple of years the wall has stayed blank. All I know at this point is that I want it to be something other than a quilt, to be different from the quilts that will be on the wall around it. If you have suggestions for a fun way to add a word to a wall, let me know!

Have you noticed the snow all around the quilt in these pictures? We got 90 cm (35") of snow over the course of a few days (including Christmas Day), and had to use our snowshoes to get into the backyard to take the pictures. While beach photo shoots are my favourite, the ones that require snowshoes are my second favourite. There's something ridiculous about tromping around the backyard in snowshoes to take pictures of quilts that entertains me. 

If you like the idea of a Mini of the Month series and you also love stash-friendly patterns and virtual sewing with friends, join us in the Stash Artists membership! The doors are open this week and you'll receive access to the Thread Love pattern as soon as you join. (And if you're seeing this post after the doors have closed, join the waitlist so you'll be notified when they open again.)

I'm hosting TGIFF again this week, so link up your finishes! And please consider hosting the party; our hosting schedule for 2026 is looking very bare. You can sign up to host here. Be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

The Last of the Christmas Ornaments

Welcome to the first TGIFF party of 2026! Did you stay up to celebrate the arrival of the new year, or did you go to bed early? We usually head to bed around 10:00, but we made the effort to stay up with Nathan and Zachary last night. We're definitely not party animals - our New Year's Eve tradition for probably the past 10 years has been to watch a movie together, timed so that it ends just before midnight. Then we wish each other a happy new year and go to bed 😆 Last night's movie was Wake Up Dead Man, (Knives Out 3). It was an easy choice, since we watched the previous two as New Year's Eve movies as well.

I have a small finish to share today, but it feels like a big one. In 2002 I decided to make an ornament to celebrate Aiden's first Christmas, with the intention that I'd make him an ornament every year until he graduated high school. When Zachary was born in 2004, I increased it to making two ornaments every year, and in 2008, I added Nathan's ornaments. The ornaments are not at all Christmas themed, instead they reflect something from their year. That means my Christmas tree is full of odd things like a frog (Zach's favourite animal that year)...

A drum set (for when Aiden started drumming)...

 Three vans (for the years they got their driver's licenses)...

This recreation of a sign Nathan made the summer he spent drawing pictures and selling them by the side of the road (it was a very successful venture!)

And so much more. What would be on the ornament was always a surprise, and coming up with something for each of them, and finding a pattern for it, was part of the fun for me. Most of the ornaments are cross-stitched, but there are a handful that are embroidered because there was no cross-stitch pattern to be found.

In 2018, I wrote a tutorial showing how I made all of these into ornaments, using the snowflake on red fabric in the picture above. It's the same process whether the ornament had been stitched on cross-stitch fabric or quilting fabric.

Aiden graduated in 2020, then Zach graduated in 2022, so I haven't been making them ornaments for a few years. Now Nathan will graduate this spring. I made Aiden and Zach an ornament with a graduation cap that I gave them on graduation day, so Nathan will still get one more ornament to complete his collection, but this was the last Christmas I made one that was a surprise hung on the tree for him to find.

I figured he knew what his ornament would represent, even if he didn't know what the design would be, but he says he wasn't sure what it would be. To me, this was the obvious choice, making it one of the easiest years to decide what to make.

In the fall of 2024, he came home from school one day saying there was a contest for a trip for students to go to France to visit WW1 sites, and he wanted to go. He spent that Christmas break writing an essay about a WW1 soldier as his entry, sent it off in January, then waited and waited. He was crushed when a classmate found out she had been accepted and he still hadn't heard anything. Then a couple of days later, he got a call saying he had been selected, too! 

The trip is an annual thing, sponsored by the Newfoundland government, and last summer they took 99 students from the province to France and Belgium, all expenses paid. They visited the 5 caribou statues that commemorate significant battles for the Newfoundland regiment, along with several other sites including Vimy Ridge, holding remembrance ceremonies at each site.

Nathan and his classmate both absolutely loved the trip, of course! Nathan was amazed by the architecture in Europe, sending me pictures of everything from stained glass windows, to stone walls, to cathedrals. His classmate declared she's going to learn Flemish and move to Bruges after she graduates 😆 It was the trip of a lifetime, for sure!

For his ornament, I thought about finding a cross-stitch pattern for the Eiffel Tower, but decided against that. Though they did spend a little time in Paris, and did visit the Eiffel Tower, that really wasn't the focus of the trip. Instead, I had Paul scan the logo on one of Nathan's shirts from the trip, then I traced that onto fabric and embroidered it with Aurifil 12 wt thread. I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

I was ready to stitch the front and back pieces together when I realized I hadn't added the year to the ornament! I'm so glad I realized that before I finished assembling it! Since the pieces were already cut, I didn't have room to stitch it onto the front, so I stitched in on the back instead. 

Though there will be one more ornament in May, this still feels like the last one in a lot of ways. I find it hard to believe I'm at the end of a Christmas project that spanned 23 years!

So that's my finish for this week's party; what is yours? Do you have a Christmas present you can now share? Whatever you've finished lately, link it up below and then visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too.

We're always looking for hosts for the TGIFF party, so if you'd like to join our hosting community, go here to sign up!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter