Teeny Tiny Rainbow - A Finish

There have not been many finishes around these parts lately so I am very happy to have a ta da moment for you.  I give you Teeny Tiny Rainbow ....

and as you can it is a little more than a ta da moment - it is also a celebratory moment!

This little mini quilt started life as part of  Sugar Bowl Crafts Scrap Busting Sewalong.  The challenge that week was:

How many squares can you get into a 5" square?  

Well I was always going to go small and so managed 100!  I knew that there was method using gridded fusible interfacing but, of course, I didn't want to wait to get some so I used old dressmaking interfacing I had on my shelf and the squares from my cutting mat.  It worked OK but is a bit wonky in places but I absolutely loved the result.

I knew I didn't want this little block to sit languishing on a shelf so I decided to add the white border and then randomly added the second border.  The charcoal and white bits are as they are because they were leftovers from my Mini to Maxi - Churn Dash.  Nothing like using all scraps!

It was only as time marched on that I realised I could turn it into a quilt and enter it into the miniature category.  The quilting happened by chance and I am not sure if it is how I would quilt it if I did it again.  The rainbow squares finish at 1/2" and so I decided to just so some outline squares as stitch in the ditch.  This was actually a first for me on my longarm and I have to say I didn't dislike it as much as I thought.  However it was 5" square not a full size quilt!  

Then came a change in plan because I realised that you could see the charcoal fabric behind the white fabric as a dark strip down the middle of the skinny white borders.  Aaaaarrrgh I had planned to quilt the borders with 1 or 2 lines of white stitching extending into the charcoal area and to the edge.  Now I couldn't do that because, to hide that mistake, I needed to quilt a dark line in the middle.  This was done several times and included lots of unpicking but in the end I just had to go with it.  Because of that I decided to quilt straight lines in the resulting charcoal spaces.  I like the difference between lines and grid and the change in direction to the diagonal.  This is something I would use again.

Quilt Stats

Finished Size:  11" x 11"

Fabrics Used:  multicoloured scraps for the rainbow centre and Kona Charcoal and White for the borders

Quilting:  was done on my Handi Quilter Avante longarm machine and I used Glide 40wt thread in Shadow and 60wt thread in Sterling

Wadding:  The Warm Co Warm and White

So the ribbon?  Well it was entered into the Miniature Category at the British Quilt and Stitch Show whichwas held in Uttoxeter over the weekend.  I was delighted to hear it had won 3rd place and also pleased to see that both this and the 2nd placed quilt were modern quilts.  It is lovely to see the rise in the number of modern quilts in all categories now.  Long may it continue!!