Mixed signals mini quilt from Fabric Mutt...

Heidi from Fabric Mutt submitted this little cute mini quilt. Heidi is a mommy who loves sewing and blogging. (Like so many of us!) She makes quilts and clutches and purses and even handwarmers! Much inspiration over at her blog! Be sure to visit!

This quilt is called Mixed Signals. When I first saw the Reunion collection by Sweetwater for Moda, I absolutely loved it. It made me think of summers on the pier at Huntington Beach when I was growing up here in Southern California. I really wanted to make a quilt that would have a nautical feel to it, but I also wanted it to have a distinctly modern vibe. Then one night it came to me: nautical signal flags! I looked up a flag chart online and immediately got to work with two Reunion charm square packs. 

Mixed Signals is a mini quilt; each block is three inches square and the entire quilt is approximately 24 by 36 inches in size. Every block's signal flag pattern stands for a letter of the alphabet; you can follow them in order from top to bottom, left to right as you look at the quilt. While it looks like the flags were paper pieced, I actually just figured out the measurements for each block as I went along, cutting out pieces and putting them together one at a time. Sometimes a quilt can be a little tedious to assemble when you construct the same block over and over, but this one was so much fun to do since every block was a new challenge. I had to throw in a small amount of an unknown black and white check print that I got at my local quilt shop for a few of the flags that called for a black element, and the sashing is a grey solid from the same source.

The quilt is backed in Reunion Baby Bunting in Ink, and I bound it in another Sweetwater print -- Town News in Cream from the Hometown collection. I absolutely love the way the grey solid and newsprint binding play off the colors of the Reunion fabrics. 

Looking at this quilt just makes me happy. I think of how much pleasure it gave me to put it together, and I think of all the childhood memories at the beach which inspired it in the first place.