Rainbow crosses {Instagram mini quilt swap}

I've been working away on the little blocks for this mini quilt for the last few weeks. I had the idea for different scaled crosses a while back and I just started making them without planning out the layout too much. Originally I planned the 3" and 6" blocks, and then after making a few I realised I needed a bigger one too for the impact. I had fun piecing these, and they were a little bit addictive to make, even if they did involve a lot of teeny tiny piecing.

Now I need to figure out what I am going to do quilting wise. There are a lot of seams so I feel it needs some machine quilting even though my first reaction was to hand quilt it echoing the crosses. Ideas anyone?

St. Patrick's Day and Rainbow blocks

Today, as I think everyone in the world knows, is St. Patrick's Day. Our national day of celebration. My kids think it is to celebrate St. Patrick throwing the snakes out of Ireland. And to go to parades. The adults know it is usually a nice extra day off work!! This year, I decided to be clever and suggested we watch the BIG parade in Dublin on the television instead of going and spending ages getting parking and walking into town, freezing our little toes off at the local parade, getting bored after 3 floats and then fighting our way back to the car through the crowds. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I am a genius. Exactly as predicted, 3 floats in they went upstairs to play a game and I got to sit around on the sofa drinking a coffee in comfort. Hurray! Much more relaxing than anticipated. We fitted in arts and crafts and nail painting too, as well as some sewing (me) and long involved games of Barbie (her) and trains (him). Himself got to watch the rugby in peace.

Anyways, it being mid March, and St Patrick's Day, we had a typical Irish day of weather involving beaming sunshine, torrential rain, hailstones and now freezing temperatures all within the space of 6 hours. Plus a MASSIVE rainbow in the afternoon.

So I decided it was time to show you some of the blocks from my month in Sew Bee Blissful. I was Miss February but somehow the month managed to escape me without me posting about it at all. I decided it was time to use the charms I collected from my 2 rounds in Jennifer's Rainbow Charm swap last year, and spent ages poring over patterns before deciding to use the gorgeous starflower block that Jennifer did a great tute for. 

Here are some of the blocks - I took these pictures last week, so more have arrived since then but I was too lazy to go out and take some more (plus, I was afraid of getting hit with another freak round of hailstones!)

Aren't they pretty? These blocks make my heart sing a little when I see them. They're so bright and cheerful and the girls in my Bee did a fab job with them.

 Look at the colours cartwheeling around! I decided to go scrappy with this, so each colour petal is made of 2 different fabrics, I think it adds lots of interest.7

 I can't wait to get the final few blocks (thanks to the postal service, some of the fabric got lost!) and to get it put together. I would love to use as a picnic blanket but I think the white wouldn't hold up to that... I'll keep thinking about that one.

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!

Swappy Good Fortune

Today, I got home from work to find a gorgeous package waiting for me. As soon as I saw the envelope, I knew it could only be my Mouthy Stitches zip pouch from my secret partner. (Because I have no fabric deliveries outstanding right now!) Then I had a look at the return address and when I say my heart jumped, I am not joking, because I recognised it. It was from the very talented Toni, and I have been lucky enough to be a recipient of Toni's handmade gorgeousness before in Pay It Forward.

Needless to say, that was the end of my restraint, and I ripped it open, racking my brains to see if I could remember what she had posted in the group pool - but failing. Then this fell out. Oh my!

Isn't it absolutely amazing? I can't tell you how much I love it. Seriously, I'm so lucky - this is right up my street. The bright rainbow colours, the beautiful modern fabrics, the hand quilting - its just gorgeous. I love the small details - the scissors in the central piece, the way she echoed the colours of the star points in the perle cotton hand quilting. So much work and attention to detail, its just beautiful.

Here's the back. I love the rainbow stripes of colour and the neutral hand quilting.

She lined it with more beautiful fabric. I forgot to take a picture of the zip ends, but let me assure you, like everything else about this pouch, they are just perfect. You can see then hand quilting really well here, isn't it lovely?

And here are the scraps that came with it. Toni read me so well, they are all so bright and wonderful.

This is a really good size pouch - it measures up at about 11.5" square and is perfect for storing my hand-quilting supplies which currently reside in an ugly box.

Yippee!!  I'm so happy right now. This was a great swap, so many beautiful pouches turned up in the group photo pool and so many talented peeps took part. Thanks again to Toni and to the wonderful swap mamas Hadley, Cindy and Susan

Scrappy Rainbow Mug Rugs

Now that my swap partner Elaine has received my mug rug, I can finally reveal :-) Elaine's swap info told me she liked rainbow colours, light backgrounds and texture; a little bit of Flickr stalking later, I realised that she had lots of hexie projects in her favourites. Of course, being still in the honeymoon period with my Accuquilt Go! Baby (can it really be a honeymoon if there is no end in sight?) I had easy access to hexies so I decided that this was the way to go. Better still, I had recently received my rainbow charms (thanks to my QAL partner-in-quilting Jennifer) so it was really a no brainer.

I took out my Go! Baby hexie die and decided to use the medium size one. (If you're interested in receiving free patterns/the Accuquilt newsletter click here to sign up!). Five minues and I had all my hexies (I seriously love my Baby!) You'll all remember my first attempt at this mug rug - it suffered from over-trimming enthusiasm and I also wasn't totally happy with my machine piecing accuracy.

So I went back to basics and decided to recut (because, why wouldn't I? lol!!) to hand sew these babies next time round. Happily, I found perfect size paper hexie templates on this site - I printed off some sheets, cut them out and away I went, a few pleasant evenings on the sofa while I watched re-runs of The Sopranos (and yes, 10 years later it is still as good!).

My mind then turned to the back...for some reason, I had in my head that I wanted this to be a double sided mug rug, but I didn't have a fabric print that totally worked for the backing and I knew I wanted to do some simple echo quilting in the white space around the rainbow hexies, which was not going to work with a different design on the back.

In the end I decided to do a wonky rainbow log cabin block on the back. I tried to emulate a traditional log cabin block by keeping cool colours at one side and warms on the other and I used a linen/cotton mix to give a little extra texture to the sashing..

I got over the quilting issue by quilting each side onto its own bit of batting. I use Warm and White which is a nice, fine batting and putting the two sides together did not make it unduly bulky. I then bound using my Its a

Hoot dotty grey fabric which remains still my all time favourite binding fabric. Lastly, I needed to write my Haiku which was the theme for this swap, so I stuck to the rainbow theme for that, and then I made a little card with a row of rainbow flags (thank you Susan for the idea) to write it in.

Then yesterday, I received this package from JohannaBF all the way from Florida:

How cool is this? I couldn't belive my luck with this great package - two, TWO lovely mug rugs - one a hexie rainbow one (SWOON!!) and the other a wonky block with a fab embroidered owl (yes, I know you know they are my favourites!) in the centre. All the way from sunny Florida :-) Thanks so much Johanna :-)))