A private swap

Just before Christmas Julianna and I came to an agreement that we'd do a private swap and make each other a cushion/pillow cover.

I am a huge fan of Julianna's work - her choice of colour and fussy cutting prowess leaves me with a dropped jaw every time I see one of her creations.

She had said she'd like a cushion cover in the same colours as this gorgeous mini quilt she made.

And I was fairly vague with my preference and just said I loved this mini quilt she'd made.

So we set to work.

I had one false start where I made something but it felt like I had made it too quickly so therefore back to the drawing board to try and make something more detailed and complicated.

I turned to the book mentioned in this blog post and this block in particular.

Not one to let a little bit of Japanese come between me and a quilt block I scanned the diagram (in the top right of the page) into my computer and then enlarged it till it would make a 10" block (four together would make a nice 20" square cushion cover), printed it off, made plastic templates and set to, cutting all the pieces individually and hand sewing them together.

My seam ripper saw a lot of action. I felt the colour placement wasn't quite right and on more than one occasion I got the colour placement completely wrong. We both love Suzuko Koseki fabric so I made sure there was some of that in there.

I bound it in a leopard print just because and ta dah, I was done.

I used monofilament thread to do a very small grid pattern all over.

It was quite alien to me to think about each piece of fabric and how they would flow. I'm more a grab and go kind of sewer but I actually enjoyed the process and by the end I was so pleased with how it looked.

We both put our parcels in the post on the same day and quite by chance, they both arrived at their new homes yesterday.

And this is what I received.

Sorry, I don't have the correct size form for it yet so I stuffed a larger one in just so you get the idea

Beautifully constructed, beautiful machine quilting (with some pretty feature stitching) and thoughtful piecing which includes my initials and a nod to being British. Julianna actually does a much better job of explaining her thought process behind it on her blog.

The back is gorgeous too and I love the finishing touch of the two buttons.

Linking up to WIP Wednesday and Finish It Up Friday

I thoroughly enjoyed the swap.

Thank you Julianna.