Busy Hands Guild Mini Quilt Workshop

The weather turned quite cold here, with frost overnight, and a high of 3 degrees today. The daffodils are laying on the ground this morning wondering what the heck happened!!
And what better activity to do on a cold spring day than quilting?!?!  I taught a mini quiltmaking workshop for the Busy Hands Quilt Guild and it was a fun day with some very creative quilters! Here are some of the students showing the mini quilt projects they started...

I have had a couple of email questions recently about mini quilting details, so thought I would answer them in this blogpost.  I have no affiliation to any of the mentioned products, just my personal preferences which are subject to change at any minute, if I find something I like better LOL :

-thread: I prefer Aurifil, but sometimes will use Mettler Silk Finish to get the right colour. Yep...I use a LOT of Aurifil! Now what am I going to do with all these saved spools people have asked me?? I might make something, maybe a Christmas wreath from them? Or not...it's hard to say what I might do!!

-batting: I use Warm & Natural since I like 100% cotton, it always lays flat and has a nice weight that I prefer. However, it is only good for machine quilting (hand quilting through W & N is way too tough for me). I buy it by the bolt for large quilts and use the excess side trimmings for mini quilts.

-quilting: the easiest finish is a quick "stitch-in-the-ditch", but it's boring to do so I prefer a free motion design most of the time these days. You can see how tiny my quilting is on this piece where the "coins" average about 3/8".

-embellishing: I love to do beading on quilts, but usually only bead the quilts that insist on it, or quilts that I dislike and think that the beading will help me to like it more! I usually use Nymo thread to attach beads or embellishments.

-binding: I prefer a double fold binding cut at 2.25" but will do a single layer binding if I am running out of fabric.