Quilt Club Australia Handmade Swap Reveal!

Photo Courtesy of Caz @ The Accidental Quilter

Caz and Kristy from the Quilt Club Australia group recently coordinated the inaugural QCA Handmade Swap. For the last couple of months we've all been secretly working on our swap projects and posting the occasional sneak peek in the QCA Handmade Swap facebook page.. but the time has come and projects are being received left, right and centre! 

My secret swap partner was coordinator Caz herself.. who said she would like a doll quilt or a table runner, and loved "Aqua, Teal, Red, Grey, Purple, Orange (not all necessarily together, lol)". As far as stalking goes, Caz and I are both part of the QCA Craftsy BOM Support Group so I already knew that after doing our April hexy blocks that she had fallen in love with EPP... and she'd presioulsy mentioned on her blog that she was making a quilt for herself using Kate Spain's "Good Fortune". Well hello! Good Fortune pretty much ticks off all those colours (except red) AND I just happened to have a bag of GF scraps from Kate Spain herself..

So I prepared myself a little take along pack (I'm not quite as organised as Caz, I haven't gotten around to making myself a Zakka sewing kit for my EPP... still using a ziplock bag!) to take to the markets with me so that I could be productive during the quiet moments.

As you can see, there were enough quiet moments for me to pin and baste almost all my hexagons... infact there was enough time to baste them all, but my poor little needle clearly couldn't take the pressure and snapped in half with only 2 hexies left to baste! (insert swearing here - that will teach me not to carry a spare needle!)

Once I got home, found a new needle and basted the last 2 hexies I divided them out into orange/purple and then played around until I got them in an order that I liked before whip stitching them together. I knew that I wanted to put them on a grey background, and as luck would have it I had just enough left over from when I'd made my bee blocks.

Naturally I appliqued them onto the grey using my sewing machine! But how to quilt it? My hexies were mirror imaged, so I couldn't echo the zig zag because it would clash in the middle, and I didn't really think an all over FMQ design would suit... luckily Phillipa provided me with some inspiration. The week before she'd made her sister a table runner for her birthday and she'd quilted it using a wavy stitch that her machine offers (sooooo need a new machine! Mine only has 21 stitches, and for a start, buttonhole is NOT one of them!).. anyway, she very kindly let me use her machine to quilt my table runner using the same wavy stitch. I wanted it to be fairly organic in that aside from drawing a line down the middle of the table runner to mark the centre point, I just eyeballed the distance between lines and didn't worry about whether the waves were matchy matchy. I didn't want to quilt over the hexies, which I think was definitely the right move.

I cut some 2.5" strips from my GF scraps to make binding, and made a little label for my table runner using Daisy my embroidery machine (I remembered to applique that onto the backing - using Phillipa's buttonhole stitch - before I quilted it) and voila! It was complete!

I forgot to take any pictures of it all laid out nicely before I sent it off to Caz because I was trying to go with the whole sneak peek thing, but luckily for me when Caz received it she took some gorgeous photos of it and said I could share them with you all!

Photo Courtesy of Caz @ The Accidental Quilter

I am pleased to say that Caz was very happy with her table runner, and plans to use it on her dressing table to complement her Good Fortune quilt - how perfect was that?! I'm so happy with the way it turned out, and even more thrilled that Caz really likes her gift.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting ever so patiently for my postman to bring me my very own surprise gift.. stay tuned!