12 Months of Minis- You Are My Sunshine Part 2

Now it’s time for part 2 of the Your Are My Sunshine Mini Quilt.

For this mini quilt I wanted to try something I haven’t done yet on my quilts and that was to mix embroidery, hand quilting AND machine quilting all on the same quilt.

So first off I embroidered the words ‘you are my sunshine’ in the bottom corner of the quilt top. You could so this before joining the top together BUT silly me, I didn’t have enough forethought for that (Hey, I’ve never been afraid to admit my mistakes before, why should I start now?!?)

I just used a simple backstitch to embroider the words. I used a mixed of yellow and orange.

And then it seems I didn’t snap a photo of that part. That was probably down to the fact that Mr #3 spilt tomato sauce all over it at that stage and by the time I had it all cleaned up I completely forgot.

So here is a photo of it all basted and ready to be quilting.

I was struggling with how I would quilt this quilt, it has a lot of negative space that needs to be filled and I wanted the quilting to be a major feature of the quilt. That would be all well and good if I was actually confident in my quilting abilities. But I’m still learning a lot in this area.

I straight line quilted in the white areas around the star and then used those lines to mark out into the rest of the quilt.

Then I just continued on my merry way quilting all the marked lines.

Next up was the hand quilting. I’ve had this yellow thread for a long long time waiting for the right project, but I just couldn’t figure out HOW I actually wanted to use it on this quilt.

Would I just continue in the same vain as the machine quilting? Would I add a border around the embroidery? I was second guessing myself continuously and it was driving me bonkers.

I don’t think I will ever be 100% happy with this quilt.

I decided on echoing the machine quilting with the hand quilting and continued filling in the lines around the ‘sun’.

Next up it was binding. I wanted to frame the quilt with something skyish. I had heaps of binding options available and I left the final decision down to hubby. He thought his choice suited the theme of the quilt and well who am I to argue?

As I said, I think I’ll never be 100% happy with this quilt, but I am certainly happy that it’s finished!

Actually Amy (1153 Posts)

When Amy is not blogging here on And Sew We Craft you can find her over at Actually Amy where she blogs about her life and other things.