This is not a potholder

I made two mini-quilts - not potholders, oh my, no no - from this tutorial at Moda Bakeshop. 

When I make small things, I usually do more than one - out of a sense of practicality, mostly - if I'm going to spend a lot of time on something, in most cases it won't take twice as long to make two.  The actual sewing and quilting, especially hand quilting, will take twice as long, but cutting and all the setup and takedown that sewing projects take will not.  

The green and purple fabric are from JoAnn's.  This shade of green is my absolute favorite, and it's hard to find because yellowish greens seem to be more popular.  This particular fabric is the sort of fabric people mean to exclude when they say for swaps and bees, "quilt-shop quality only."  It's thin and sheer and not particularly well-printed.  But it's the green that I like!  

The tutorial was really good, but I did put some of my own tweaks in.  For instance, the center of the first one I did turned out pretty badly. 

As you can probably see, the points don't meet.  (I'm noticing that the two top purples aren't the same size, which wasn't as noticeable in person - will go back and see about tweaking that somehow.) 

So, I threaded a needle, came up through the back, and cinched all the points together.  Much better, and better than a bead, which I had also considered, but which (to me) would have just screamed "whoops, that didn't turn out well, better cover it up with a bead."  

I also folded the whole shebang (i.e. made the 2-3 folds on each section), then sewed it all, before going on to the next shebang.  Doesn't seem to be an advantage to doing it one section at a time, and there's a lot of back-and-forth with the sewing machine.  

And here's a lesson that I apparently haven't learned well enough: contrast.  The purple and green are both light.  They look nice together up close, but far away it's hard to make out.  Solution: hanging it in a tiny room, in this case the laundry room, where you can never be too far away from it.   

The second one used quilt-shop quality fabrics.  The greens are from a big fabric order I did of greens-I-like, but these turned out to be more yellowish than I was expecting.  They look really great and Christmassy with the red and white, though. A plain white and/or red would have been better, because those fabrics blend a bit more in the final product than I would've liked. 

If I ever make these again, I'll probably make the folds bigger than 1/4," especially if I'm using prints.  And I'll use a more substantial fabric for the base, like a Kona cotton.  

Having made a truly silly amount of navy bias binding for the orange tumbler quilt, I was able to finish the green one as an octagon rather than a square. Didn't get a picture of that by itself, so here's a group shot with some other finishes I'll be writing about soon. 

Linking up with crazy mom quilts for Finish it Up Friday.  Happy crafting!