A Finish! Mini Quilt Exchange

When I began my blog earlier this year, the very first person who reached out to me as a fellow blogger was Kate @ Smiles from Kate.   I'm sure a lot of you already know what a sweetheart she is. In the process of getting to know each other, we decided to do a mini quilt exchange for Christmas.

Kate and I have very different styles.  She tends to like solids and tone on tone fabrics where I tend to like bright riots of color.  And I wanted to do something that reminds me of our friendship.  So what to do?  Well, for starters, back in June, 2016 Kate had her very first giveaway on her blog and I was the lucky winner!  Here is what I won:

I resolved to use something from this stack to make Kate's mini.  During the same week, I won a charm pack of Kaffe Fasset fabric.  Out of this stack, I noticed that this particular square went really well with the orange piece in the stack of squares Kate sent me.

So here comes the start of an improv mini!  

I began by sewing a black frame around the square and then a wider border using the orange fabric.

Then it sat like that for a few days while I was deciding what I wanted to do.  So I just waited and watched for ideas and then I cam across this fabric.  It is called Pecking Order by Quilting Treasures.  I should have bought more than I did,   I didn't have enough to make borders.  Oh well.  Improv!

I'm pretty sure Kate is not a big chicken person but there were three reasons I bought it.   

1.   It made me chuckle and I hoped it would make her laugh too

2.   I was living on a farm that had a lot of egg laying chickens while I was making this for her, so it will be a 2016 memory, and 

3.   I imagined that these chickens, being as bright and colorful as they are, probably must have some cool looking poop that looks just like this Kaffe Fasset fabric, So that's this mini's name.  Chicken Poop!  

So I sewed a row of chickens onto the top of what was already going on.

Earlier this year, Kate made a beautiful quilt called City Lights. 

So my thought was to add some blocks using this design around the edge of what I had done so far and just keep building it up.  Well, that meant making some pretty tiny blocks and I have little patience for teeny tiny.  So I scrapped the whole border idea and ended up just making a bottom row in honor of City Lights.

 After this, even after asking for advice from others, (thanks Tish and Paige!) I kept waffling back and forth about what to do (I'm rather indecisive) and by then Christmas was over!  I finally just added a row of flowers from the chicken fabric and then framed everything with the black and white polka dot just to get done!  

Now, how to quilt  it?  To make it even more about our friendship,  I started by using a stitch that Kate taught me!  So in the orange parts, I quilted three lines of serpentine stitching.  I'm still kind of new at it and I was happy that 3 out of 4 of the strips had good spacing.  

In the "poop" and the chickens I quilted swirly lines that remind me of the way chickens might meander around.

On City Lights, I'm not so sure I like my choice  of quilting there.  It turned out kind of Frankensteinish.  But that was another new stitch I learned this year.  So this little mini is kind of a reminder of a few things that happened during our first year of friendship.

Ah, FINALLY done with all but the binding and I had a curious observer whom I had to gently dislodge before I could finish.

So may I present . .  . "Chicken Poop!"

I have to confess, I am not very good at binding corners yet.  What is the secret?  It kind of makes the whole think look a little lumpy.

So Kate, I hope this little mini will make you smile and think of your friend in Idaho!

Linking to:

Monday Making at Love, Laugh, Quilt
Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts
Moving it Forward Monday at Em's Scrapbag

Bambi's Show and Tell Monday