Shadow Block Mini Reveal (My First Mini Quilt)

The day has finally arrived!!  Reveal Day for the Shadow Block Mini!  Yahoo!  I can hardly wait to see the variety of versions everyone came up with.  Here is my story of how all this came about.

I have been wanting to make a mini quilt for quite a long time  and as fate would have it, my fellow New Quilt Blogger Jen Rosin of A Dream and a Stitch was thinking along the same lines.  And even more coincidental, we were both attracted to the same mini!  So we decided to make it and blog about it together and invite other quilters in on the fun as well.  Although I really wanted to (because I'm naturally curious), I did not ask her anything about her plan, what colors she was going to use, or how she was going to quilt it.  I wanted to see what different kinds of ideas we would come up with using the same pattern.

The pattern we used comes from Debora at Studio Dragonfly.  Thanks, Debora!  She is joining in with the rest of us and making a new version of this pattern,

Since I am such a lover of lots of color, I chose to do my mini quilt with a sunshiny yellow background and the squares in a variety of colors.  I call this quilt Rainbow Crumbs.  It was so fun to chain piece all those tiny little squares and rectangles.  It goes very quickly. 

My mind sometimes takes weird turns and I thought wouldn't those pretty yellow bits look nice against my blue top?  Blue and yellow are a good combo, right????

Umm . . . no.  A jewelry designer I am NOT!  Stick to sewing, girl.

As I was sewing this project, I learned something important.  The directions usually say what they say for a reason and sometimes you can fudge them and sometimes not.  My first mistake came when I didn't read this line carefully:  

"Each row of five blocks will need four 1 1/2" x 3 1/2" background rectangles sewn between."

:  

I sewed the shadows on the wrong side so they were facing the four block rows instead of the five block rows.   I sewed them on the right hand side of each block and they should have been sewn on the bottom shadow side.  This forced me to put the long sashing strips horizontally instead of vertically like the directions said.  I thought oh, well, it will still work out.  Well, kinda, sort of.

Now, the left hand side looks like this with no sashing

And the right hand side looks like this with pieced "sashing".   :(  

From a distance it probably won't matter that much once I sew a strip on the left, but it would have been so much better to have both sides and the top and the bottom all looking the same with a sashing strip.   Pooey!  Oh well, I'm going to keep going.  It would be waaay to much trouble to rip everything out.

Now for the back. I'm not really wanting to use a large piece from my stash so decided to just improv piece the back of it from my scraps.  I figured if it didn't turn out well, nobody is going to see the back anyway.  So I grabbed this stack of scraps . . .

and made this for the back .

Now for the quilting!

As Debora wanted to do in her tutorial, I wanted the blocks of color to stand out so I quilted the shadows first in a snakey line.  I'm pretty sure this has an official name, but I can't remember what it is.  Candy something.

Then, because I has having so much fun quilting, I proceeded to quilt the snot out of the rest of it!  I mean, I really got carried away. 

So much so that I forgot to check out was happening on the back side.  Oh no!!  The batting got folded over and sewed into some of the quilting.  Lesson number two learned.  Keep an eye on both sides!

I 

This was not going well.  If I was more professional than I am, I probably would have ripped this out and requilted that area, but I didn't. Quilt police, please forgive me!  I decided to leave it and see how much of that would be trimmed off when it was trimmed and bound.  It almost, but not quite disappeared.  I could probably try to pick out that batting of the bit that still shows one of these days, but I decided since it's hanging on the wall, probably nobody will ever see that.

So here is the finished Rainbow Crumbs!  I quilted it so densely that it stands up on its own!  This picture is my mini just leaning against the wall so the edges look a little wavy since it isn't just hanging straight.   

Here is a closeup of the quilting.  If you will notice, the squares that I wanted to emphasize all ended up rather wrinkly.  I learned what stabilizing means and this is what happens when you don't!  I didn't have enough basting pins in there before I started.  Another lesson learned.

This quilt was full of learning experiences for me.

I was so excited to get done that I made ANOTHER goof!  I machine sewed the binding on the back side instead of the front so the hand sewing appears on the front.  Oh brother.   

Well, regardless it is my lifetime fourth finish and  I am learning a lot this way without totally goofing up a large quilt.  I think I'll do some more minis!  

Oh!  One other thing I learned is that if you are doing dense quilting, it is probably best to outline the objects that you are quilting so it looks  more organized on the back.  I knew the back really didn't matter for this project, but it will on future ones.  Even though the back is rather busy on this one because of the improv piecing I did, I still kind of like the way the quilting looks, but it would be better with the sashing  outlined.  Don't you think?

Please be sure to visit the rest of the ladies on today's Reveal Day for this Shadow Block mini blog hop.  We are giving prizes to two of the bloggers who participated and also THREE prizes to randomly selected visitors who comment on any of the ladies in the blog hop.  

Prizes will be:

Jennifer Strauser of Dizzy Quilters  will be providing a set of blue batik squares to do your own shadow block mini

Jen Rosin  of A Dream and a Stitch will have a surprise prize.  I haven't seen it yet but she described it and I would love to win it myself!  You can win this prize by leaving comments on all the blogs in the blog hop.

I will be providing 3 fat quarters to a random winner who leaves a comment on any blog in the hop.

Please be sure to visit  the following ladies to see their versions of the Shadow Block Mini!   I will be creating a tab on my blog with a gallery of the all the Shadow Block minis once this blog hop is over so if you would like to be included in that gallery, just send me your Shadow Bock mini pictures.  And now on with the show .  .  .  !

Jen Rosin at A Dream and a Stitch

Janice Holton at Color, Creating and Quilting (you are here)

Debora Exum at Studio Dragonfly

Amanda Everest at Quiltologie

Susan Arnold at Quilt Fabrication

Bonnie Stapleton at Institches with Bonnie

Jennifer Fulton at Inquiring Quilter

Jennifer Strauser at Dizzy Quilter

Joanne Harris at Quilts by Joanne

Anja Clyke at Anja Quilts

Mary Schuberg at Needled Mom

I will be linking up with:

Sunday Stitching at The Creative Side
Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts
Monday Making at Love Laugh Quilt
Fiber Tuesday and Busy Hands Quilts

I'm so glad you stopped by!  Please do come again and follow along on my quilting journey!