Hide & Seek

While Hide & Seek is the name of one of my quilts, it also resembles my blog activity recently. I seem to have got totally out of the habit. I think it's a combination of being busy, procrastinating, and a feeling that I've pretty much covered everything already, and nothing's really new or different (though perhaps the latter is just me making excuses!). But I have so many things to share, so I'm going to make a start, and try and get back on track.

Hide & Seek was made for my niece Georgia's third birthday, but took a detour via an appearance in the recent issue of Australian Patchwork & Quilting Magazine (Vol 22 No 8). I was delighted to discover it had been chosen as the cover quilt:

The design from this quilt came about from my desire to use equilateral triangles and to feature Tula Pink's gorgeous Birds and the Bees collection. (Though how any of Tula's fabrics could be described as 'reproduction' I'm really not quite sure!) Nevertheless...

Rather than using EQ7 software as usual, I doodled around with pencil and paper (my hands need to keep active in meetings to allow me to concentrate properly, and this achieves the secondary bonus of extra design time) until I came up with this.

Also unusually for me, this quilt is predominantly from the single fabric range - with just the magenta and aqua solids added. The aqua trail forms a single, unbroken path through the triangles.

The name comes from both the childishness of the game, and the idea of following along the path and finding the hidden animals Tula hides in her prints. I just love the squirrels.

I quilted this one fairly simply; with a ribbon in matching threads along the aqua path and around the magenta border, stippling in the outer border, and trails of freehand open feathers in the sections of prints between the path. The pink thread is Superior 'Masterpiece' (a very smooth, lustrous 50wt cotton) as I had the perfect shade, and the aqua (which I also used over the prints) is FilTec 'Glide' (high-sheen 40wt poly). It was my first time quilting with this thread, and it really does glide beautifully through my machine - as well as giving a beautiful glossy sheen.

In a happy accident, I didn't have quite enough of the magenta left for the binding, so stretched it out with some shorter lengths of the aqua, and I'm really happy with the result.

The quilt was returned to me just in time for me to give it to Georgia in person, and I was rewarded by a huge grin, arms clutching her new quilt, and a wonderfully unprompted kiss, cuddle and 'thank you'. I count that a real success!

I hope to be back again soon.