UKminiswap quilt

Somehow I found myself signing up for another Instagram swap! I think it was late last year and of course the April deadline seemed so far away at the time…

This is the UKminiswap organised by Nina and to be honest I was very attracted by the reduced postal rates involved in having a partner in the same country as me.

I hadn’t really though much about what I would make but then I started a Cathedral window sample during my last workshop back in January and put a photo of it on Instagram suggesting it could be for my partner. When I saw that she liked it I decide to go with it!

But then I was too busy to do anything with it until the last week, when I finally had a bit of a break.

This is a bit of an experiment with CW as usually I make my background all the same fabric. I did try different fabric backgrounds once before but I made them similar colours so that there wasn’t such a contrast.

This has a real checkerboard of low and high volume fabrics, which you can see better from the back (and also you can see my mistake missing a dark square out!).

I used the machine to sew the rainbow windows down (so you get a nice pattern on the back) and then added some hand quilting in different coloured perles.

For an extra my partner will get one of these Japanese Origami bags made from a beautiful new organic fabric line from Windham called Forest Parade. I’ll fill it with some goodies too. But I have plenty of time for this as I actually finished way ahead of the deadline for once!

I do like the way the dark ‘flowers’ between the windows pop out in this piece, it looks very different from my other Cathedral Windows.

And obviously I hope my partner likes it too!

If you are interested in  learning how to make Cathedral windows with me then check out the workshop I am teaching at Simply Solids on June 13th.