This mini quilt was designed with my cats in mind.  I have a water fountain style drinking bowl that tends to get little splashes of water on the floor, so having a mat around it would protect the floor. And why have a regular mat when you can have a quilted one, am I right?

In addition to serving my cats, I also wanted to use up some of my Spoonflower swatches.  I sell fabric designs on Spoonflower (shameless plug, feel free to check out my designs), and when you proof your designs, you end up with an 8×8″ swatch of each design.  This mini quilt is the combination of several collections worth of swatches that colour coordinated.

Below are the supplies required to make this quilt.  I took these fabric swatches and combined it with some fabrics I had on hand in my stash.

One thing to keep in mind is that Spoonflower swatches may not be exactly 8 inches square.  When making half square triangles, it’s important that the starting square be an exact square.  I quartered each of my swatches into 4×4″ squares, which meant that in some cases, I actually had a small portion of unprinted design in my square.  This is fine since it’s within the quarter inch seam allowance; it won’t show on the front end of the quilt.

From these 4 inch squares, I created half square triangles using the method described in my HST tutorial.  Each HST paired one green-based fabric print with one beige-based fabric print for a total of 49 HST units.  I was one green square short so I ended up using one square of a non-Spoonflower print from my stash to balance it out.

I sewed my resulting half square triangles into 7 rows and 7 columns.  When I was done, I decided to sew quilting stitches on the diagonal, sewing in the middle of each triangle half using a walking foot guide to help keep things evenly spaced.

The quilt currently lives in the corner of my kitchen for my cats’ water fountain.

Although I used it for a utilitarian purpose, it does look pretty nice draped on a table too!