Here is another one of those blog posts that I started writing weeks ago and never finished. Seems to be the norm around here! Story of my entire life right now…

A few months ago, I got an email from Kristy of Quiet Play. (No big deal, only one of my very favorite quilters! Her patterns are awesome and she’s one of the reasons I learned how to paper piece.) She is a part of a team of ladies who run a quilting magazine called Make Modern, and she wanted to interview me for a feature she was writing up on the mini mini quilt swap trend on Instagram. (What?! How amazing is that?!) (Sorry, I’m still kind of like, whaaaa?)

And now I’m realizing that I’ve never blogged about the mini mini quilt swap, so here is the condensed version:

Sometime last year or so I wanted to test a quilting technique, so I sewed together a tiny little section of it. I thought it was cute, and I’m easily entertained, so I fully quilted and bound it. I made a post on Instagram basically saying it would be fun to make and trade a bunch of them, kind of like trading cards for quilters. Several of my friends wanted to play along so I created the #miniminiquiltswap tag and it’s just kind of taken off from there. I’ve got dozens of these tiny quilts now, from all over the world! I even traded with a little boy from Indonesia. How cool is that? It amazes me how many people have joined in. I really love seeing all of their amazing tiny quilts! They make me happy.

So, along with the article, Make Modern has been hosting a mini mini quilt challenge on Instagram, and it has just added fire to my obsession. I cannot make enough of these silly things. The top six are new ones I made during the challenge, and the bottom photo is a stack I traded a few months ago. Juniper joined in as well and made probably the cutest mini quilt ever. I’ll post a picture of hers soon. (So like, 6 months from now? Probably, haha!)

Oh gosh. I almost forgot. I have to post this because Shaun will never let me hear the end of it if I don’t. Back when I was answering Kristy’s interview questions, Shaun decided to answer them all for me. I promised him I would post his answers on here. He’s silly. (If you want to see my legit answers, the article is in issue 11 of Make Modern!)

How did the mini mini quilt swap come about?
The first time I did a mini quilt swap I was disappointed by how small the quilts were. If you try to use them they cover like a quarter of you at most. This led me to introduce the large mini quilt. However that did not catch on, I don’t know why but no one seemed to want a mini quilt that was the size of a bed. Then the movie Ant Man came out. That movie changed my life. I decided to make an Ant Man size large mini quilt and the rest is history.

Why mini mini?
I ask myself that same question every day. Honestly almost any other name would have been better. I could have, and should have called it any of these: Ant Man size large mini, micro, nano, quantum, mini2, or even sminy (this is a word I invented that combines small and tiny, I had hoped it would be as big as ginormous but it hasn’t caught on yet).

What size makes a mini quilt a mini mini?
That depends, Enstine showed us that all size is relative. So the size of the mini mini that’s right for you will be different than the one that’s right for me. A good rule of thumb is to measure the distance from the tip of your fingers on your right hand to your navel when extending your arm at a 38 degree angle above your head. Then apply that number to this formula:

And there you go!

Do you have any tips for people to keep in mind if they made their own mini minis?
What? Other people are making them? Okay, here’s a tip: get a good lawyer because you are about to get your pants sued off!

How can people get involved if they are interested?
First and foremost go see Ant Man! If you have not done this then you will never truly “get it”. Second, get online and sign up for as many mini mini quilt swaps as you can. Don’t worry about sending quilts to your swap partners as this will just eat up time that you should be using to sign up for more swaps. Third: Profit!