We have two months between miniature quilt meetings so why am I always working on my project in the few days before each meeting?

The rail-fence blocks were done a long time ago – leftover scraps from a table runner, a chair cover and a bunch of neutrals I had in my bin. I always intended to make something with them and when I looked for a project for our meeting the idea of getting a bin of blocks off my table really appealed.

I made the pattern up myself. I was hoping for more of a shadow box look to the blocks; perhaps I need to have the border colours the same width. I think my Second Time Around (Splendid Sampler) will be done with shadow boxes so I’ll find a different tutorial when I start putting those together. I have to admit though that when I see the photo it does give a bit of the effect I was going for.

The “feathers” (and I use the term loosely) were my first attempt at them. Some are better than others but since I was keeping this for myself I decided they were good enough.

The name of the quilt comes from the 40 pieces of fabric that make up the centre squares in each of the blocks.

In 2016 our Guild hosted an event involving the Guilds on the Island and along the Sunshine Coast. I used some of these same blocks in a miniature quilt that was part of a raffle basket.

UPDATE: Sold at the 2025 Guild Quilt Show – $25

I was going through some files on my computer and realized I had never featured my Celtic Crystals quilt. This surprises me as it is probably my most ambitious quilt to date (and it may not ever be topped).

This was a block of the month that I purchased from one of our local quilt shops (no longer in business). Of course I didn’t keep up with those blocks. A quick look through previous posts says that I finished Block 1 in September of 2013 – it was pretty much downhill from there! I remember that the block didn’t finish to the right size and it had to be taken apart and redone – no wonder I was put off the whole thing.

The quilt is done entirely in batiks; I love the colours in batiks but it isn’t my favourite fabric to work with. I pre-washed all the fabric but I did it all in one batch so I worried for most of the piecing that I had enough of the right colours to finish all the blocks, and that I was using the right colours in each block. I needn’t have worried as I had lots of fabric left.

I was able to find some post from Superior Threads that showed how they quilted each block. Although I wasn’t able to follow their exact plan it certainly gave me some inspiration and courage to attempt a few new designs.

The quilt hung in the 2017 Quilt Show and now has a permanent place in my stitching room on Texada. And it wasn’t until our Christmas trip that I noticed I had put something together wrong. Too late to change it – do you see the problem?

The idea for this originated with a Guild Christmas Party. We were all handed 25-patch blocks and we proceeded to play a game of Bingo with them. The calls were “birds in red fabric”, “snowflakes on blue fabric”, etc. I didn’t win any games, but I came home with an idea of making a Bingo quilt. I thought it would be fun to play at the beach using seashells as our Bingo markers.

I decided on columns of red, blue, green, yellow and orange for my 25-patch blocks, all from my scraps. It was taking a long time and I was running out of scraps of the right colour but with different patterns. When I had grandkids here over the summer I had enough blocks that we were able to play a “trial game”. The trial failed miserably and I set it all aside.

When an opportunity arose to try my hand with a long-arm quilting machine I quickly put together enough blocks, in no particular order or colour, for a fast finish. It took about three hours to quilt on the long-arm and setting up the machine took at least an hour of that time. Although it was fast to complete the quilting, the long-arm will take as much practice as free-motion quilting on my own machine to get anything that looks good enough to use as either a donation or gift.

This is my first finish of 2018! I’ll throw it in the car for sunny days at the beach but until summer I’ll use it to keep myself warm when we watch TV. It is small enough that I can wrap my legs in it and still be able to knit.

And who knows – it looks to me like it would make an awesome “I Spy” game.