All can be revealed….

 The past few months I have been working on a secret mini quilt. I have been a member of the UKQU (UK Quilters United) group on Facebook for some years and earlier in the year announced a secret mini quilt swap and opened up a sub group for this.  There was a form to complete with likes, dislikes other distractions (besides quilting), colour choices, etc and I soon received the name of the person I would be making the quilt for along with her preferences.  As a group we were encouraged to ‘stalk’, not in a creepy way but to look at any clues through social media which would encourage me to make a quilt that my partner would appreciate.

I was assigned to Cathy.  She lives further along the coast from me in East Sussex. I noticed that she is taking part in Focus Cutting Sewalong run by Naomi Clark-Mordy. There is an Instagram hashtag #focuscuttingsewalong to follow if you want to know more. It highlights certain aspects of fabric prints in shapes, which this year is a pentagon crown of which three of these shapes put together make a hexagon. See this image from Lina Patchwork below that I took a screenshot of.

I bought the pack of pieces but never made any, but it got me thinking of hexagons.

I already had assorted hexagon papers and I also had a card die of hexagons in different sizes and a few Ashmead Designs hexies too.  Using various novelty and patterned prints in my stash I got together quite a few assorted hexies.

Next I had to make the quilt background.  Cathy has a love of colour but I thought of a slightly more calming but colourful background for the hexies.  I had a fat quarter of rainbow stars in Lewis and Irene Over the Rainbow range (from 2021) which was perfect and I also had some rainbow ombré fabric for the binding.  

Above is a small corner of the quilt, which I converted to greyscale as a teaser on the group page, just to show there was a quilt in progress.  The rainbow binding were two strips of fabric going from the middle point of the quilt to the top and bottom with both strips meeting in the middle of both ends. As you can see  I quilted with wavy lines of straight stitch, some lines with white thread, some with a white metallic just catching the light.

With that done and adding hexies as and when. I turned my attention to the ‘extras’, a little gift to put with the finished quilt.  I thought as she was gaining these pentagon/hexagon shapes, Cathy would need something to put them in, so I made a Lola pouch (pattern by Sotak Handmade) which I’ve made several times.  As we both live in different towns on the south coast, common to both places would be gulls.  I have some Gulls in Breton Jumpers which fitted that theme. 

I have a yarn subscription this year with Blue Fern yarns and there’s always a tea sachet, coffee stick and Lotus biscuit with that, so I popped those in the pocket and added a pack of  Percy Pig sweets in too, Cathy’s favourite sweets (didn’t know how many varieties there were!). Also in the bag was a postcard (made in 2018) of sunflowers and a crochet coaster (designed by Sussex based designer Eleanora Tully of Coastal Crochet). Picture below by Cathy on her Facebook post.

Back to the quilt and I had the pleasure of putting on the hexies to the quilt. I had the idea of tumbling hexies, getting bigger and joining together at the bottom of the quilt.  Taking the focus cutting in mind (some would call this fussy cutting) I used the various sizes of papers. By the time I got to the 1” hexies at the bottom they looked enormous compared with those in he rest of the quilt! 

Anyway I finished at the end of August and it was waiting patiently through September to await sending to Cathy this month.  I had a bit of a panic as I learnt she’d gone to Paris, but that was only a day trip, so she was home to receive her quilt and she was delighted! So here it is

Do you want to know what I got?

Following me was Janet, who also got that I lived on the south coast and was inspired to make this lovely underwater quilt

She also included a handy pouch with a fabric marker (that’ll come in useful) and machine needles (definitely useful!). I’m not sure where it’ll hang yet, but there will be a home for it. 

It was fun to make although I felt a little overwhelmed at the beginning when the members of the group were putting up posts of do you like this or that to get clues about their partners.  But once that calmed down and ideas were gathering it was easier to get on and get it done.  I might do it again next time…..