mini nines quilt

Welcome to day 2 of the No Scrap Left Behind blog tour! Today the lovely Lee Monroe of May Chappell is sharing a project based on the mini nines quilt from the book. I've had a chance to visit with Lee a few times at Quilt Market and also at Quilt Con this past February. She's just lovely and she does amazing work. Go check out her post for some tiny piecing, her scrap sorting methods and a chance to win a copy of the book!

This quilt was started in July of 2013 and I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be done if I hadn't included it in the book. I needed the deadline! It was definitely a labor of love (or perhaps all out crazy?) but I'm glad that it is finished, not a languishing UFO! I had it draped on the back of the chair yesterday and my husband asked if he had permission to lean on it. Hahaha! He knows it's a special one!

Those tiny pieces in the 9 patch blocks finish at 1/2"! It's quite fun to hear all the gasps when I share this one at trunk shows. It is a good sign that I am living up to my blog name. Ha! I'm not exactly sure how this quilt started out, but I think it was because of a pincushion. My friend Tara said, "wouldn't a whole quilt out of those blocks be amazing? We should do that!" So I did.

Since this one was in progress for so long, I decided that the word perseverance needed to be put on the back. Originally, I wanted to paper piece the word, but I ran out of time, so I wrote it with free motion quilting on a piece of fabric backed with some interfacing instead. It got the point across and it was much quicker.

The biggest lesson I learned in making this quilt is that when you are piecing tiny things like this, it's helpful to make some of the pieces larger, then trim them down. In this case, cutting the borders for each block a touch bigger than needed was very helpful. If only I would have learned that sooner, I would have saved myself a sleepless night or two. But hey, here's to lessons learned! :)