Embrace the Chaos Mini Quilt

Here’s my second Aurifil Artisan project for this month! They asked the team to make something inspired by the new year and for me, a new year always means new goals. I’ve already talked about my broad 2022 goals and my specific project goals for this winter, and last week I shared one more goal-driven list — the unfinished objects I’m hoping to tackle this year as part of my guild’s UFO challenge.

So voila! Here’s my first UFO finish of the year!

I made this mini quilt top back at the beginning of October in a Libs Elliott workshop hosted by the Houston Modern Quilt Guild. Libs has created a really fun quilt-creation method using a variety of quilt blocks and random rolls of a dice, so even though ~20 of us took the same workshop, we all ended up with totally different and unique-to-us quilts!

I started quilting this over the Thanksgiving break and thought I’d be done in a day — it’s a mini quilt, after all. But somehow it sat, and sat, and then it got buried under other things over the Christmas holidays. My sewjo has been missing lately, and somehow I just couldn’t find those last couple hours to finish it off.

But the UFO challenge motivated me! I knew this quilt would be a great way to kickstart my UFO progress since it was already so close to being done. Last week I added the last few lines of hand quilting (and made the nifty video above). On Friday, I managed to find just enough of the dark gray fabric in my stash to make binding. And on Saturday, I stitched the binding and added a simple label.

My first UFO finish of 2022! Hurrah!

The stats:

• Quilt measures 20″ x 20″.
• Top fabrics and binding are Speckled by Rashida Coleman-Hale for Ruby Star Society.
• Backing is a Michael Miller print.
• Pieced with Aurifil 50 wt thread in #2600 (Dove).
• Hand quilted with Aurifil 12 wt thread in 4 different colors.