Late last year, I joined round two of the Rainbow Mini Swap hosted by @katebasti on Instagram. My first two swap experiences were very rewarding and I thought I would try it again.  I’ve been working here and there on my mini to give away and will talk about it more in another post. What I really want to highlight today is a little mini mini I made for myself as a reminder of the beautiful fabric and experience.

I decided to improv piece – a technique I have been wanting to try. I used the scraps from cutting out my pieces for the mini I’m giving away. I knew this would result in a small quilt, but really just wanted a reminder and knew this would work. I laid out all of my pieces and took a little time deciding how I would proceed. Initially I thought I would use some of the colors more than once, but decided that one of each fabric would be sufficient.

I began by placing all of the pieces that I wanted to use side by side. This worked with this improv because I was just doing a long row of colors. I began piecing each color to create my long row. The pictures below show the steps, minus a picture of me sewing two of the greens together.

Once I completed my whole row, it was time to iron then trim.

The strip ended up being smaller than I wanted and thought it would be, but I learned 2 things. The first was that if I wanted it bigger, I needed to start with larger pieces. Yep, it’s true: bigger fabric = bigger quilt. The second was that had I pieced some of my blocks a little differently, I could have manipulated the outcome to make it a little larger.

In finishing, I added a white border with Kona white and matchstick quilted. I loved the look without a binding, but prepared one anyway but did not have time to put it on before my quilt guild meeting. I took my mini mini with me to the meeting for show and tell and all of my quilty friends encouraged me to leave it with a raw edge! I was happy to have a little validation that it looked just fine the way it was.

I’m glad I tried this technique and look forward to future projects that are larger.

Happy Quilting ▶︎ ▶︎ ▶︎