A Mini-Finish

I finished stitching down the binding on my DQS10 swap mini-quilt last night. Hand-stitching binding was the perfect thing to do while watching my Spartans play a game of basketball that was, in turns, awful, pathetic, semi-okay, decent, amazing, incredible, infuriating, and heartbreaking. I'm used to watching these guys win come March. What am I going to do with myself now that I have no team to root for? Guess I'll sew. : )

At any rate, my DQS quilt is now finished. I'm pretty confident that my partner is going to like it. I paper-pieced these blocks from a pattern that I created. It's a fairly standard New York Beauty block, and there are probably dozens of similar paper-piecing patterns available online, but I had trouble finding any that were small enough for what I wanted to do, which is why I ended up creating one myself.

Normally, with a New York Beauty block, you would paper piece the entire thing—the rays, the background, and the center. But I wanted to fussy cut the centers out of a print from Tula Pink's Parisville collection. Since NY Beauty blocks are pieced in quarters, that wasn't going to work. So I appliqued the centers onto the completed blocks instead. Hey, it works for dresdens, right? I think it was a good solution.

I was a little stumped with the quilting, but eventually decided I didn't want to put too much quilting on the New York Beauty blocks themselves. As you can see, I've got some busy fabrics going on in there, and the overall look is very ornate. I thought quilting over the top of that might just be a little too much. So instead I just did echo quilting around the outer circles.

I really love how it turned out and I hope my partner will like it too! It's ready to be shipped and will hopefully be en route, along with a few little extras, by the end of the day.