Rainbow Petals Quilt

I found the free pattern for this "Flower of Life" quilt on Craftsy and knew that I wanted to make it for the Instagram Mini Swap.
I originally thought that I would needle turn appliqué it, but it was taking too long and so I turned all the edges under and then machine appliquéd it. Raw edge with Bondaweb would have been much simpler and have a similar effect.

I traced the leaves with a Frixion pen on sand paper to stop them wriggling around too much.
Statistics
Machine Appliqué
Approx 20" x 20"

Toadstool Embroidery Pouch

Le Challenge - Wood


When the theme of wood was announced we had just been Geocaching and I'd found this cute little wooden toadstool in one of the caches near to Stanton Drew, south of Bristol. In Geocaching, you can take something out if you leave something else behind, so we are leaving a variety of plastic zoo animals. If someone followed us around the same caches then they would have a whole set of animals. Stanton Drew has some standing stones and it's a lovely area to go walking, we saw honeycomb in a hollow tree that had come down with the wind....but Tim was stung by a bee before we had time to investigate it.
Anyway I thought the toadstool would look lovely on a scrappy pouch with some embroidery. I've had the Cotton Floss embroidery book by Nathalie Lymer for quite a while, so I embroidered the toadstools, adjusting the pattern slightly as I don't like satin stitch.

Chase has a lovely free pattern for a scrappy mini iPad pouch on her Quarter Inch blog so I based mine on that, but enlarged it slightly.

I spent some time trying to get the scraps to look right, swapped a few in and a few out and eventually I was happyish. I find it quite hard get the scraps to play nicely together but I love the style. I enjoy doing the hand quilting which I marked out using the rounded edge of a metal knife as I've no Hera marker and Frixion pen leaves white marks on dark fabrics. The knife worked really quite well and I'll use the same next time. I put a dab of glue on the back of the wooden toadstool and then did some colonial knots through the holes to hold it in place. Unfortunately I snipped the corners off the outer pouch to make them neater when turning, forgetting that the hand quilting was fastened off in the corner, so hopefully a dab of glue will keep it from unravelling!
I'm also linking to Scraptastic Tuesday as this is such a great tutorial for using up 2" scraps.