I saw this pattern and new I had to make this quilt! I realized that it would be the perfect quilt to make as a gift for a penpal. There are a few different patterns for the same idea, and I almost went with Carolyn Friedlander’s version, but then I decided to order the “You’ve Got Mail” block through Craftsy.com. I surreptitiously emailed my penpal to get an idea of colors that she likes, and was thrilled that she said blues and greens as those are also my favorite colors and I have tons of blues and greens in my stash. I knew I wanted a “handwriting” fabric for the middle of the envelopes, and was able to find some at Sewing Party–a modern fabric store located near me. I was set!

You’ll notice on the first few blocks that I chose to make the area surrounding the top part of the envelope a different color, and luckily I decided with the rest of the blocks not to do this… I was worried there wouldn’t be enough color variation if each block was only 3 fabrics, but I would learn that this was not something to worry about! 🙂 Also, the paper piecing went very easily as I have taken the Craftsy Foundations of Paper Piecing class and I had no problems with this pattern. In fact, I really like it because the blocks are mostly rectangular so it’s easy to cut them and feel like you’re not wasting a lot of fabric.

I sought the help of my quilt guild for the final arrangement of the mini quilt. I felt it needed some “oompfh” and had the idea to fussy cut a different fabric for the center block. I brought all the fabrics to my guild’s sew-in and they came up with the awesome suggestion to use this as the center block.

Because this was a gift, I had Cosmic Quilting quilt it for me and she did a SPECTACULAR JOB!! I was in love with the finished project and it even won 3rd place in my guild’s Mini Quilt Challenge!! I was so honored to win 3rd place!