I picked this pattern from one of the magazines available through the Mini Meez group. I love Dresden plates and thought I could English Paper Piece it. As a challenge to myself I had been hand piecing some of my miniature projects; this project would allow me to hand piece and hand quilt.

Things didn’t work out as planned and, when I was done, I was temped to throw the whole thing out the window. But I knew the other Mini Meez were very interested in the pattern as I was stitching , so I started over, this time using my machine.

I made all my fans the same colour. The fans are appliquéd using a blanket stitch; I used a flip and quilt method, with the appliqué stitches serving as the main quilting. A stitch-in-the-ditch cross hatch finished the quilting.

On the way to Little Fans, Let Me Count the Ways was born.

Let me count the ways I messed up:

• I didn’t allow the ¼” seam allowance in my English paper piecing templates so everything was much smaller than it should have been
• I didn’t cut the setting triangles properly and I didn’t recognize the difference between setting triangles and corners
• The hand quilting worked okay (using fine crochet cotton) but I didn’t square the piece first so many of my knots were in the area that would be squared off and the stitches could come out very easily
• The actual squaring up process was dismal as I tried to keep points and half triangles on the edges
• Because the piece wasn’t squared properly the binding isn’t square either
• When it was all done I pressed it and there was something on my iron that transferred to the piece
• When I washed out the spot the iron left, the colours in one of the fans ran even though I had used a colour absorbing sheet