Sunshine-April Mini of the Month

This is my version of  the Sew Can She blog's Mini Quilt of the month.  This one was designed by Jennifer Heynen and is available as a free pattern on Craftsy.  This is the first one that has been an applique quilt instead of pieced which presented some problems.  I don't have a working printer so I traced the templates from my computer screen.  This method worked well for some of the Splendid Sampler blocks as they had the inch scale printed on the pattern and I could enlarge as needed.  There was no scale on this pattern so mine is slightly larger.  It measures 15 x 13 with the binding instead of the 11 inch square of the pattern.  Part of this was intentional on my part as I wanted more of the sun's rays to show.   Overall, I'm happy with it except for the binding.  My skills seem to deteriorate with each quilt!  I'll probably take it off later and resew hoping for better results on the corners.  I did add triangles for hanging and with the heatbond, layers of fabric and batting that was a lot of layers to sew through.

For the fusible, I used Heat n Bond in the red package.  It was after I had the whole thing laid out and ready to sew did I read the section that said not to sew!  Since it didn't bond very well at all, I don't know how they expect a finished project to last.  I used some scraps and tested using a topstitch needle.  My machine sewed it very well and I had no problems.  I quilted with freehand arcs using a gold thread after sewing down all the shapes.

I used a grey fabric for the background so I'm calling this "Sunset".  I'm out of blue sky fabrics.In fact, I'm now out of a lot of basics.  My stash that I thought would last so long now consists of mostly smaller scraps.  Do you buy fabrics for the current project only or do you have a stash?  How do you choose prints to add to your stash?

Linking up with Em's Scrapbag for Moving it Forward Monday  andLove Laugh Quilt