Oct 11, 20213 min read

Dutch MQG challenge: MINI & maxi

I am a member of the Dutch Modern quilt gilde, or Dutch MQG for short. I love to come together with other quilters to exchange ideas, see what they are working on, or just for fun. Since the pandemic we have been doing our bees online via Zoom 2 times a month. I try to join as often as possible. One of the things we do with our gilde is have a theme we work with every 3 months. And for the months juli, august and september our theme is mini & maxi.

With the Dutch MQG bestuur (board) we choose 4 blocks and challenged the members to make 1 (or more) of those blocks and make them very small, aka MINI, or very big, aka MAXI. Ofcourse being a modern quilt gilde the goal was also to create something modern. First I started with the MINI block. I've had this pattern in my stash for at least 1 year, maybe even longer. I decided I wanted to use only solids to let the pattern be the star of my mini quilt in stead of the fabrics.

The pattern I used is the pineapple block from the mini-series, by Giuseppe Ribaudo, known as GiucyGiuce on Instagram. and Alison Glass. Each line is less than a quarter inch wide and you can go as big or small as you want with this pattern. It's a foundation papier pieced pattern, this means you sew on the back of the paper and use it as guide line. This helps you create nice straight lines, and to make sure each line has the same with as the previous one.

After sewing all the pieces of fabric on the paper, you square it up and remove the pieces of paper from the back. Now you are left with a very neatly sewn quilt-top.

Looking at the front cover of this pattern I really loved the rainbow effect and I went for roughly the same. I'm not a big fan of purple and had a lot of pretty pinks in my scrap stash, so I went with more pinks. When planning out my mini quilt, I made the decision to use the full pattern of roughly 7.5 inch by 7.5 inch. I counted out how many rows I had to make and ended up using each colour twice to make sure I had enough colors to create the perfect rainbow.

Starting out with a pink center and gradually moving to a dark pink. After pink I used a color called Tangerine (the dark orange) to change the rainbow to yellow. From yellow I went to green and ended up with a dark greenish blue at the final circle. For background I used a really pretty dark grey called graphite. All the fabrics are Kona cotton solids.

The pattern takes a lot of cutting, and especially ironing. To make sure the process went smoothly I spend some time preparing the small pieces of fabric before starting to sew, so I could just keep going: sewing, ironing, cutting and repeat. When the top was finished I went with minimal quilting. By quilting a few lines right in the middle of each section I wanted to create the illusion that there are 8 points each half grey, half rainbow.

I used a fabric from Tula Pink for the backing, I just absolutely love this print, the hexagons changing in a rainbow is my absolute favorite to use when I'm making a rainbow colored project. I used the same colour for the binding as I used for the background. As the final step I love to hand sew on the binding on the back. I think the final moments, slowly finishing up a project is so satisfying, seeing each little part and putting that little bit of extra love in a project.