Rainbow trail mini - progress

I am a little (well, okay more than a little) obsessed with these blocks at the moment. I'm really enjoying playing around with colours and value with them and seeing what I can create. I've decided to make a snail trail block for my 4x5 Bee hive members (yes I know. MORE of them...) and one of our group asked for rainbow colours with a dark grey background. Cue me trying to work out how to make it work, and pulling a couple of piles of rainbow fabrics (SO much fun - I'd never done it before, but I see some rainbow quilts in my future!)

I decided to make a couple of trial blocks to see how it worked - and then though I might as well make them into a mini while I was at it. So I made four rainbow snail trail blocks over the last couple of nights. My original plan was a layout something like this:

But once I'd made the blocks it just didn't look quite right - not how I'd imagined it. I actually stuffed up the blocks when I sewed the four patches - I wanted the light and dark grey to alternate on the sides (which I think would have looked better). So then I tried flipping tow of the blocks to create this:

Again, it didn't quite look like I wanted - and I didn't like how the eye was drawn to that centre bit. So I flipped them all so that the centre of the mini was the light and dark grey:

I really like this placement. I love the rainbow running around the edges of the quilt, and how the greys look in the centre. So I sewed them together, and was pleasantly surprised by how well the points matched up (a bit of easing required though ;) ) I started quilting it last night with straight lines about 1/4" apart. I toyed with doing dense FMQ on the grey, but the geometric lines in the quilt really sang straight lines so I went with that. I'm pretty happy with how it looks so far:

I don't think I'll quilt the coloured parts at all (or if I do, just do a single line of quilting close to the edge). I'll straight line quilt the corner sections as well.

I'm stoked to nearly have my first finish of 2012 - yay for mini quilts :)

Happy stitching,
Jess