Chaletgirl

Thank you for all your lovely comments on my “Disappointment” post. You are all way too kind. I am still learning and I hope that I will keep learning and challenging myself. You should know that the positive experiences I have had far, far, outweigh the negative and the only thing that will keep me from swapping is a brand new baby. But thank you so much.

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Last month I joined a group on Flickr who had started a monthly mini quilt swap – the idea being to make a small quilt between 6″ and 12″, perhaps from a leftover quilt block from another project; and swap it.

This is known as the 6″-12′ Mini Quilt Trading Swap and considering I invited myself, they have been a very friendly and warm group of quilters. The inspired co-ordinators came up with an option for each month – make a ‘plain jane’ quilt of your choice, or participate in the theme for the month.

June’s theme was Traditional English Paper Piecing. I’ve never done this before, but I thought:

“How hard can it be?? It only has to be 6 inches square!!!”.

You saw a sneak peek here:

But now that my swap partner, Fiona, has it in her hot little hands, I can show you the rest:

I used hexagon templates from the Cia’s Palette website, and whilst it was a bit fiddly getting started, I soon got into the rhythm, and loved the portability of hand-sewing. This little quilt was almost all hand-sewn – the only time it got near the machine was to sew the raw edge of the binding on.

The background is a Kona Cotton (I have finally discovered a local stockist – up until now I have had to use homespun) and it was lovely to work with. The backing is some Freshcut from Heather Bailey.

I’m really proud of this little quilt. I think this is the first time that I:

• didn’t follow a pattern,
• combined fabrics from different designers/ranges,
• was not inspired by something I had already seen, and
• just went with the flow.

And I love the result. I am surprised, each time that I look at it, that I broke all my habits and came up with something that I love. This tiny quilt was a breakthrough for me and I will admit to being very sad to see it go off in the post.

But I figure there is more in me where that came from. Let’s see where I can go from here.

July’s theme is Triangles. Hmmmmmm……