SNCA Feathers

More stuff! This was a swap quilt, which I was obscenely proud of, and which went down well with its recipient!
If you're coming here from IG, you probably know about the #saturdaynightcraftalong, in which everyone gets together in the tag and posts what they're doing on a saturday evening, and cheerleads each other and drools over other people's projects. It's good, laid back crafty fun, and at the tail end of last year, the organisers of the tag set up a swap.

My partner asked for blues and terracotta, and a couple of her suggestions on her mosaic made me think of feathers. It was like a match made in heaven!
I love this pattern by Quietplay; it's the simplified version of her feather paper piecing pattern, but it lends itself to scrappy so well! I went through the stash and pulled out all of my blues (I had a lot) and found some Kona Spice which reads to me as terracotta. The background is an Alison Glass print, which wasn't my original choice, but it worked so perfectly with the birds and the little gusts of wind!

When it came to layout, I knew I wanted to do something other than just three feathers in a row, and after a bit of playing around, I came up with the idea of the feathers falling from the sky.

Great idea, nothing complicated about that... oh, fuck. Y-seams. They are my bane. I know how to do them. I did a million of them when piecing Caroline's quilt a couple of years ago, but these ones were at weird angles.

I'm sure someone smarter than me probably could have done this without all the extra bodged piecing and y-seams, but I was working with a finite amount of fabric, and a size requirement!

It actually came out ok, with minimal fabric wastage, and hey, I can always use more scraps!

I backed it with Kona (don't ask what shade, I can't remember) and bound it in more of the Kona Spice.

For quilting I went with 'organic' matchstick. My free motion quilting is not up to scratch for something like this, so I went with something simple.

I also slipped in a set of Aneela Hoey's Fold Up Pouches made with some of my long hoarded Echino stags. I love it, and I only bought fat quarters of each colour (originally to make cushions) but my partner was a fan, and hey, better to be used than gather dust!

This project used up, and generated a load of scraps. There's Dashwood, Amy Sinibaldi, Kate Spain, Alison Glass and a couple of other fabrics that I got in scrap bags in there! You might guess from this that I use a lot of blues!