my small world QAL {section 1}

Well, I love to jump on a quilt-a-long bandwagon, that's for sure!  Of course, I could not resist the #mysmallworldqal over on Instagram and here in blogland, too.  I found the special issue of Quiltmania with Jen Kingwell's pattern at my local Barnes & Noble and couldn't wait to get started.

As soon as I got the magazine, I got right to work on the sky and buildings section.  I generally try to cut my scraps into usable sizes now when I am sewing and have a few big boxes with 5, 2.5, 2 and 1.5" squares so I (foolishly) thought I'd probably have enough low volume squares to make this section.  Ha ha.  Someone counted up all the 1.5" squares for the sky in this quilt, and I believe it is 731!  In any case, I made a mess of the sewing room but also this fun little section.

I couldn't wait to use some Heather Ross Tiger Lily, that happened to arrive during the making of those buildings (the yellow butterflies and pink ballerina).

Now that the buildings were complete, I got to move on to the "fun part."

Teeny, tiny, colorful patchwork!  Be still, my heart.

I pretty much threw those little templates out the window for most blocks and just made HST and trimmed them down to size.  For a few sections, mostly the other kinds of triangles, I made paper piecing patterns by tracing the templates - so much more accurate for me.

I did the curved block at the bottom left using the templates and I did the needle turn applique as directed, too.  Glad I took Carolyn Friedlander's Aerial Grove class at Quiltcon, although needle turned applique is so much easier on organic shapes that don't need to be perfectly placed on a block.

So here is the full Section 1, in all of it's 12.5x33" glory!

I am linking up with Quilt Dad today (who has some brilliant ideas on using cheater prints to cut down on the work a little) and hoping to be able to keep pace with this one. At the moment it is quite hard to sew anything else.