Thanks and Four Seasons Quilt Swap (Winter) revealed

Thanks everyone for your best wishes following my announcement of our exciting news! I told my work colleagues today, most of whom were very happy for me, but a couple were concerned about who'd do all my work once I disappear on 12 months' leave!

The big plan is for Carl and I to swap back once the baby is born, he will return to work, and I'll be back home as a full-time mum for a year. After that I'll go back to the office, but will also start looking for a job in Tasmania. It's all systems go!

Still haven't had a chance to go through our holiday snaps, as I have been madly finishing off the Four Seasons Quilt Swap for Winter 2008. Having had such terrible and debilitating nausea for the past six weeks made it a bit of a trial to get it finished by today's deadline, but finish I did!

I'm pretty confident the person receiving this quilt doesn't read this blog, so I'm happy to reveal my handiwork here:

('tis actually square - 19" x 19" - but my terrible photography doesn't make it look so!)

And detail of the hand quilting - only used as a highlight this time - and I used no.8 Perlé cotton for effect:


The design is a reverse appliqué - a Hawaiian appliqué - an idea I got from the book 'Rags to Rainbows' by Miranda Innes (an oldie but a goodie). It was a little bit fiddly, and some of the edges frayed slightly, but I like how it turned out.

Here's the back:


And a detail of the label:


If you're wondering how it's done, I got a Hawaiian snowflake design from the Internet (there are literally dozens of sites with templates for kids to cut out of paper), printed it, traced it onto some fusible web, fused it to the navy snowflake material and cut out the snowflake. As it's a reverse appliqué, the 'snowflake' is discarded. But I liked it so much I stuck it to the back as a label!

Once you've cut out the design, you fuse it to the background fabric and voila. I did a tiny zigzag stitch around the design to secure it to the fabric and then hand quilted inside and outside the design.

It's a technique I've not tried before, but I quite like how it turned out. Let's hope my swappee likes it too...