Portrait of a Flower Mini Quilt and TGIFF

Welcome to another TGIFF party, where we celebrate our finishes!

This year for Stash Artists members, I'm creating a new mini quilt pattern every month. I'm having so much fun with it! I have so many quilt ideas I want to make, so this keeps me playing with something new every month. If you're not a Stash Artists member yet, you can join us and get in on the mini quilt fun, too!

The April Mini of the Month is Portrait of a Flower. It's a fun mix of piecing and appliqué, with a big, bold flower taking center stage.

It was also ridiculously hard to get a good picture of it 😆 No matter what I tried, the colours look more flat than they are in real life. I bought myself a bouquet of flowers to use as a photo prop, hoping they'd make for more interesting pictures.

Even with a special daylight light and some editing, the colours weren't quite right. The flowers sure are pretty, though!

I've always loved appliqué quilts. My very first quilt was an appliqué quilt and I rarely go long without doing at least a little bit of appliqué. Like most I've done, this is fusible, raw-edge appliqué. I keep telling myself I'm going to learn needle-turn appliqué, but haven't tried it yet, probably because I keep doing EPP as my hand stitching project and there are only so many hours in the day!

I chose to only stitch around the flower pieces with the quilting, and I used my free motion foot to go around each shape three times close to the edge with matching Aurifil 50 wt thread (1135 for the yellow and 4225 for the purple). For the flower center, I also quilted a spiral from the edge into the middle of the circle. For the flower petals, I only quilted at the edges, leaving the petals to puff up a little.

For custom quilting like this, I'm usually making it up as I go along. I rarely know what I'll do in all the various parts before I start. So once the flower was finished, I looked at it for a while before deciding to do a dense loopy meander in the background around the flower. I then decided to do a tiny spiral meander in the purple. I didn't realize before I started how similar it would look to the loopy meander around the flower, especially since they're both pretty much the same scale, and by the time I noticed I had quilted enough of it that I wasn't interested in ripping it all out. I'm calling it a lesson learned, not a mistake!

The back and forth lines in the white sashing break up the sameness of the quilting nicely. The yellow cornerstones have the same back and forth lines, but on a diagonal.

I love, love, love how the quilting looks on the back!

The flowers do make a nice prop 😊

For the binding, I really wanted to use the same dark purple I used for the flower petals, but didn't have enough. Purple is one of those colours that can be hard to match, since it can have either blue or pink tones, and I didn't have enough of any other dark purple that had the right tone to match the flower. I did have two that were similar enough that I thought I could get away with using them both, which would give me enough for the binding. It's really hard to tell it's not the same fabric all the way around the quilt!

When I was decorating for Christmas, I was looking for a place to hang my Let It Snow mini and ended up using really strong magnets to hang it on the fridge. Since it wasn't Christmas-specific, I left it up until almost the end of March, but then it felt like it was time to take down the snowman (even though we still have a lot of snow!). The fridge felt really bare, though, so I tried Portrait of a Flower and was thrilled to see it fit perfectly. The magnets are from the innards of a computer and their odd shape looks kind of like a frame on the corners of the quilt. I think I'll always have a quilt on the fridge now!

That's one of our wedding pictures above the quilt

That's my most recent finish. What's yours? Link it up below, then 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

My First Quilt with Marlene Oddie

Did you blink and the month of March disappeared? Me, too! Fast as it may have been, it's the last Friday of the month and I have another first quilt story to share with you. This time Marlene Oddie is sharing the story of her first quilt.

Marlene (Baerg) Oddie is an engineer by education, a financial services systems professional by experience, a project manager by profession, and a quilter by passion. She believes in the KISS (Keep It Simple S______) method and has incorporated this into the company name.

You can connect with Marlene at her website, on Instagram, on Facebook, and on YouTube.

And now, here are Marlene's first quilts! First, one she made as a child.

And then the first quilt she made as an adult.

What year did you make your first quilt? What prompted you to make it?

As a child about 1978. (As an adult 2001.)

My neighbor said it was a right of passage to make a quilt so she took the time to teach me to blanket stitch sun bonnet sues and overall sams with fabric scraps from clothes my mom had made me onto muslin. Sashed it by machine and tied it with a Holly Hobbie sheet on the back.

2001...9/11 prompted me to consider my legacy...and my local church started offering quilting classes. After joining and making a flag from the scrap bin I quickly ended up leading out at subsequent sessions after the teacher was in a car wreck. 

What techniques were used in that first quilt? Did you quilt it yourself?

Adult: Machine piecing, including some strip/strata style sets to make the star field. I quilted a big star on the star field and in the ditch of the stripes. I tucked under the edges of the top and bottom and sewed around the edge. Not really any binding. But that is how we had done the "as a" child quilt in 1978.

Who taught you to make the quilt?

Child quilt. Velma Judson

Adult quilt...just did it on my own.

Are the colours you chose for your first quilt ones you would still choose today?

Not really.

Did you fall in love with quilting right away? Or was there a gap between making the first quilt and the next one?

Big gap! About 23 years.

Where is the quilt now?

I still have it. The flag hangs on my shop wall to show how far I've come.

Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself as you made that first quilt?

Blanket stitch isn't the only way to make a quilt.

Anything else you want to share about your first quilt?

I'm grateful now for my neighbor who gave me a seed of inspiration that took awhile to germinate.

Thank you, Marlene, for sharing the story of your first quilt!

Quick Updates

This post contains affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission if you click on the link and make a purchase. That does not affect the price you pay.

I have just a few quick updates I want to share today. It's a pretty random assortment, but I wanted to get them all out there, so we're going with the randomness.

I'll start off with some sad news in the online quilting community, which you may have already read: Make Modern magazine will stop publishing new issues at the end of this year 🥲 I have loved Make Modern for a long time, and not only because they published so many of my patterns! They're not selling subscriptions anymore, but single issues are still available for purchase. Or you can purchase the All-Access Pass, which gives you access to every issue they've published (that will keep your quilty heart happy for a while!). 

Make Modern has been a big part of my journey as a quilt pattern designer and in the online quilting community as a whole. They'll definitely be missed. But they're not gone yet, and I'm looking forward to watching them spend the rest of the year celebrating their 12 years of quilty goodness.

Here's a throwback to when Stand Out Starburst was on the cover of Make Modern, back in May 2021.

And now on to my own updates! 

Registration is open for two Conquering Curves workshops happening soon. The first will be this Saturday, March 28th at 1:00 PM Eastern (10:00 AM Pacific) and the second on Thursday, April 2nd at 6:00 PM (3:00 PM Pacific).

During the workshop, we'll use my Noodles pattern (included in your registration) to sew gently curved blocks. I'll share all my tips and tricks for sewing pucker-free curves, which you can then use for any blocks with curved seams, like drunkard's path blocks or inset circles.

Both sessions will be recorded and the replay link sent to everyone who registers. You'll be able to watch it again while practicing your new quilty skill, or if neither session fits your schedule, you can still register and just catch the replay.

Register for the Saturday, March 28 session

Register for the Thursday, April 2 session

And for my last update, I've been sharing a fun series of videos on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. It's 30 days of Quick Quilting Tips and today is day 10. So far I've shared tips about quilt binding, colouring quilts with crayons, and more. If you've been watching the videos, I'd love to know which has been your favourite so far!

I've also created a spreadsheet where I'm sharing links to all the tips videos, plus extra resources that go along with them (like the link to my quilting binding tutorial when the tip was related to binding). You can get access to that spreadsheet here and get caught up on all the tips and the resources!

That's all the news around here. I've been cutting a lot of scraps lately, drawing lots and lots of lines for some stitch-and-flip flying geese, and just generally enjoying my time in my sewing room. I hope you're doing fun quilty things, too!