Jaybird Pattern Review – Mini Northern Lights

This post is part of the Jaybird Quilts Sew Along. For schedule of guest post pattern reviews, prizes, and contest rules, click here. Today’s guest post is from Andres of Mad Tesla. Andres is president of the Ventura Modern Quilt Guild in California, and a mad solids quilter. I love quilting with solids!

I don’t currently like following patterns, I like working on my own designs. But I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity to take part in Sara’s sew-along. You see, only month’s after I started sewing I took a class from Julie. The pattern we were taught was Northern Lights. I haven’t finished this quilt yet, and I get friendly grief from Julie every time I see her. All of Julie’s patterns I’ve seen are very-well designed and easy-to-follow and Mini Northern Lights isn’t any different. Julie’s rulers, both big and small, are well-made and easy to use. Julie even includes a template within the pattern if you don’t want to buy the ruler. I do recommend you buy her rulers. They can be used for multiple different projects, both from Julie and your own designs.

I’m most comfortable using solids but for this project I wanted to use something…pretty darn close to solids. I decided to use Robert Kaufman Essex linens. I enjoy working with RK linens and they come in a wide variety of colors. In retrospect I probably wouldn’t have worked with a fabric that isn’t so open-weaved, it made working with the small pieces a *bit* harder. I’d like to think I’m a relatively safe rotary cutter-user but this ruler is DAMN SMALL. I was a little scared of slicing off one of my more-favorite fingers. Thankfully I had a pair of cheap safety gloves to use. I’m happy to report that there were no near-accidents (phew!). I swapped out my regular rotary cutter for a smaller one. That really helped cut out the small pieces. Cutting the pieces was a breeze and I chained-pieced those together. The one place I deviated from the pattern was in piecing the rows to each other, I pinned a lot more than the recommendation. I was very worried about piecing them accurately. I’m sure that the recommended amount of pinning is more than enough for most people. Any inaccuracies with the piecing all me. The back is one boring piece of extra Essex fabric and the batting was a scrap from a earlier project. I quilted some simple straight(ish), irregularly-spaced lines parallel to the edges of the half hexagons. I did not get around to binding the quilt but easy to follow instructions are included in the pattern notes. I enjoyed making this mini-quilt, the pattern was well thought out and easy to follow. Even a rookie like me can easily figure out how to get from point A to point B. I highly recommend both Julie’s patterns and rulers. One warning though: finish your projects or Julie will know. Or maybe that’s just for me.