Fall Pumpkin Mini Quilt

I have been waiting so patiently for fall to arrive. I love fall and decorating the house to go along with it. Summer seemed to take it’s time getting here, so I don’t want to get too ahead of things and cut it short by putting all my summer décor away just yet. So while I keep myself from running up to the attic to swap things out I decided to do a little prepping for when I finally give myself the go ahead.

A couple years ago I had the privilege of being Vice President at PWOC in charge of Programs. PWOC is Protestant Women of the Chapel, a bible study for military wives. As V.P. Programs I was the special events party planner. It was a huge job, but thankfully there were a lot of women that helped.

The Chaplain had asked our board members to come up with ways to include more female soldiers and wives into our group. One of the things that I started up was a monthly craft night.

I am not a stand-in-front-of-people type woman. I trip over my words enough talking to my friends and family, so being in front of people wasn’t going to happen. I needed a fellow crafty person with the confidence to teach a room full of women. Janeen was the lady for the job.

This is what she taught us to make:

I love the colors used in this and I keep it out all year. Though it is usually sitting behind the couch on a book shelf.

Here’s a group shot. It’s so fun how everyone’s turned out so differently. That’s Janeen in the middle next to me. She was so brave to be in front of all these scary women. Just kidding, they are all super nice.

Anyways, this painting was my jumping off point for the Fall Pumpkin Mini Quilt. I took the colors and swapped them around so that I had blue pumpkins with a tan background instead.

I wanted four pumpkins with a border that looked like vines weaving through. I sketched for a while coming up with a few ideas and this is the one I liked the most:

If you are just here to see a basic overview of the process, great, keep reading on. But if you would like detailed instructions on how to make the blocks necessary for this project I’ve got you covered.

For the 9″ pumpkin block instructions click here.

For the cross-over border instructions click here.

For this project you will need:

• Blue (B): fat quarter
• Pattern Blue (P): fat quarter
• Dark Brown (Br): fat quarter
• Light Brown (LB): fat quarter
• Tan (T): half yard
• Color of choice for back: 1 yard
• Color of choice for binding: 1/3 yard

Start by making 4 pumpkin blocks.

As I was going through my stash I came across this patterned fabric I had used probably 5 years ago for a quilt I made for my Mother-in-law. I loved the soft muted browns and blues it uses, like in my painting, and used it as my jumping off point for the other fabrics.

As I was moving fabrics around I saw this really dark spot on the fabric like someone had taken a marker and scribbled on it. As I looked closer I realized I had been looking at the wrong side of the fabric! The right side is very detailed with dark crisp lines. I decided to stick with the wrong side.

Next make the border blocks.

Now lay it all out.

The X and Stripe blocks line up so that they look like the dark and light brown pieces are crossing over each other, hence the name Cross-Over Border.

Next comes sewing the little squares into chunks. Then those chunks get sewn into bigger chunks.

Finally the top is done.

All that’s left to do is to quilt it together and bind it up. I chose to use the blue patterned fabric for my binding to pull a bit of the blue to the outer edge.

Here it is on my table with Mrs. Cluckington and her guard dogs.

I would love to decorate my table with more Pinterest worthy décor. You know the kind with layers of place settings and fall foliage. But, that is not going to happen. We eat, do homework, dump random stuff, basically use this table as a normal family does, so this mini quilt is pushing the table décor boundary. Mostly it’s slowly easing the fall decorations into the house without the summer decorations getting too anxious about getting stored away.

Hope you enjoyed this quick fall project!

Have a great day!