All the way back in September I started two mini quilts for Josh. The first was the Batman EPP quilt I gave him for his birthday and the second was the Death Star from Quirky Granola Girl.

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I figured I would start both and hopefully finish one by his birthday in October and the other for Christmas. Mollie from Wild Olive made her own Death Star mini quilt earlier last year and gave me some of the gray scraps she had leftover.

Piecing it was a lot more intimidating than I expected. There are a lot of little pieces and circles are much more tricky than hexagons. I did glue basting for the first time which was absolutely amazing for the awkwardly shaped ones, but I still don’t think I could ever fully convert to glue basting. There’s just something I love about basting hexagons with thread. Mollie suggested referencing the book All Points Patchwork: English Paper Piecing beyond the Hexagon for Quilts & Small Projects* for information about joining rounded shapes and it helped a lot. (I reviewed this book last year and you should definitely check it out if you’re interested in English paper piecing, it’s fantastic!)

I started hand quilting it and I was really unhappy with it. I was feeling overly critical of my piecing of the Death Star and I felt that the hand quilting was really just highlighting all the wonkiness. I did a few Photoshop mockups of different quilting ideas and decided to just do a simple diagonal quilting. I used Moda Basics Grunge for the background fabric.

I managed to make the whole thing without Josh knowing, I was really excited to be able to surprise him with it. I also crocheted a Death Star using this free pattern, it was a very Star Wars Christmas around here.

You can get the Death Star mini quilt pattern free from Quirky Granola Girl.