Framed Quilt Art
I had been wanting to try a framed mini quilt for a while and my husband is a bit of a woodworker, so we thought it would be a fun tandem project! We both really like a local quilter named Louise Gray, so I picked out one of her really simple discontinued designs, Print No 4, to recreate.
This was super straightforward to put together, but took me FOREVER to decide on colors! At first, I was leaning more towards a navy center, but I just couldn't find an accent that had the right look. I ended up shifting to grays, and used Kona black for the center, charcoal (one of my new favorites!) for the arms, and silver for the background. I think it ended up being around 16x20?
Alex made a frame from 3/4" plywood that was a little smaller than the mini quilt on the outside perimeter. This allowed us to take the mini quilt, without having to worry about borders, and staple it to the sides of the edge. No reason to use nice wood for this part because no one will see it. You can see what the frame looked like to the right, and can see up close shots of how the quilt got stapled down in the two pictures below!
We used staples because we knew that an extra frame was going on the outside that would cover them up. I think this would also look good stretched but not framed, in which case you would want to make sure your frame was at least an inch inside of the edges of your mini so you had room to fold it the 3/4" height of the frame plus a little extra to staple it to the back, rather than the sides. You can see in the second picture that we addressed corners mainly by folding them, kind of like gift wrapping, and stapling them down. This was reasonably successful!
Alex used cherry to make the outer frame, but you could use any wood that captured your eye or matched your decor! I think we could have gotten it a titch tighter, and there are some creases from the assembly process, but I'm pretty sure those could be steamed out. I really like this finishing method, and have ideas for a few others! If you make one, I'd love to see it :)
