Sea Breeze Mini QAL Blog Hop!

Today is my turn on GnomeAngel's Sea Breeze Mini QAL blog hop and I'm so excited to share my work with you. A special hello if you're here for the first time. It's lovely to have you visit! If you're new to this QAL the pattern we're working on is the Sea Breeze Mini Quilt by Megan of Canoe Ridge Creations. It's a sweet little pattern with so much scope for variation depending on how you arrange your colours.

The first thing I noticed about this mini was secondary patterns created by the white half square triangles (HST), and the star pattern they create in the top left and bottom right corners called to be highlighted. As I mixed and matched colours (in an old cross stitch design program because I don't have any quilt design software!) further patterns began to emerge that I hadn't noticed at first. I realised that the plain squares in each block create a diagonal grid leaving a square in square pattern in the gaps. This is the layout I decided to use.

I chose to use peach and coral as my main colours largely because I have used so much blue and green recently that I wanted a change! And they play so nicely with these grey solids. I love scrappy quilts too so I used a number of different coral and peach fabrics but made sure they were almost exactly the same shade so that the pattern would still read clearly.

To create this pattern all nine of my blocks are exactly the same. I made HST with the dark grey and white together and the coral and light grey together. I pressed my seams open as I love how flat this makes the quilt and also I find my piecing is soooo much more accurate when I press this way! I arranged my squares as pictured below and sewed them into blocks. The blocks are then arranged at alternate angles to create the final pattern.

I'm really happy with the finished result! I had an idea to quilt the square in square areas with closely spaced straight lines and after a lot of turning and burying thread ends (and maybe a little unpicking...) it turned out better than I imagined.

I used the dark grey solid for the back and pieced a strip of coral and peach scraps to make up the width. I used white thread for both my top and bobbin and I love the way the quilting shows on the back!

For the binding I used the pale grey solid and used a single fold binding rather than double. I always do this on my mini quilts as it creates a finer edge which suits the smaller quilt size. I've heard someone comment that this is not as durable as you only end up with one layer of fabric covering the edge rather than two. I don't think this is a big concern with a mini as they are more for looking at than dragging around the floor. Hmm, maybe someone should tell my toddler that... 

As single fold bindings don't seem to be as common I took some pictures of my process and will share a mini tutorial tomorrow on how I created my single fold binding. If you're interested in finishing your mini with a finer edge please pop back and have a look. I've so enjoyed being part of this QAL and seeing everyone's progress. Looking forward to seeing your finished mini's!