Mini Zephyr

It's June and the annual Minnesota Quilt Show has just ended.  In previous years, I've had quilts in the special exhibit hall and was part of a panel talking about pattern design.  This year, I dipped my toe in a bit farther and entered a quilt in the judged category.  Presenting Mini Zephyr!

One of the categories this year was "miniaturization", or making a tiny quilt that could be mistaken for a full-size quilt in a photograph if there wasn't a point of reference available.  As soon as I saw this, I immediately became obsessed and had to try it with Zephyr.

The mini Zephyr, or "Love Letters via Zephyr" as it was officially entered into the quilt show, has the exact same number of blocks as the two cover quilts, it's just made at a very small scale.  I actually used the baby size Zephyr as a guide for fabric placement (this is the bottom quilt).

And here's how it looks compared to the finished throw-size Zephyr.  I did change the piecing slightly to eliminate some seams.  In the full size quilt, making it this way would result in a lot of fabric waste, but at this tiny scale it wasn't that much at all.

The name of the pattern comes from the fabric line I used, Love Letters by Lizzy House.  I fussy cut almost every single print piece of fabric in this top.  I didn't win a ribbon, but the judges were very nice in their comments.  The only negative one was that I should have scaled the binding down a bit.  That made me laugh because I love a chunky binding and I actually did scale it down so it didn't overwhelm the piece!

I made the hanging sleeve from the same fabric as the backing fabric.  All the quilts all need the same size sleeve regardless of how big they are, so it looks massive on this little one.  The quilting is the same wavy lines that I used on the baby size Zephyr and the binding is the same as the background fabric.  Because the piece is so tiny, I didn't want to distract the viewer with extra details.  This will be hung proudly in my house so that sleeve will be staying on.

I had a lot of fun making this quilt and trying to take photos that showed how tiny it actually is.  Maybe I went a little overboard!  This was a fun personal challenge and I'm glad that I got to share it with so many people at the quilt show!

And, of course I have to close with a photo of myself with Zephyr at the quilt show.  The quilt makes my head look huge, but you can tell how happy I was to be there!