flutterby mini quilt - winged blog tour

hello! and welcome to my stop on the winged blog tour by bonnie christine! i'm so happy to be taking part today and if you don't know bonnie you need to go and follow her at her blog going home to roost. 

today i'm going to show you what i made with this wonderful fabric. bonnie generously sent us 4 fat quarters (and wow! it was super hard choosing only four!) there are two colourways and i decided to mix them together to make a mini quilt featuring the butterflies (and the perfect purple)

{fluttering up the garden fence}

{this little one is my favourite}

i had so much fun with this project! when i saw the butterflies fabric i knew i just had to make them a feature! i used the garden fence block by hyacinth quilt designs and fussy-cut the butterflies for the centres. my idea was to have the butterflies fluttering around in the garden, so i cut out the rest of the butterflies and sketch-stitched them on top of my quilted top and ta-dah! a flutterby in the garden mini quilt!

be sure to follow along with the tour, all the makes are so lovely!

rachael x

: : a study in pretty

today is a lovely autumn day, you know the kind where it's sunny but also wonderfully cold, i love these types of days and it's the perfect kind of day to take some quilt pictures!

while i was taking my pictures i had a little dander around the garden, all the trees are bare and it's all quite brown, but there are some spots of colour left and i think they are a little bit magical, the colours of autumn are my favourite!

i have always wanted to be able to do 'pretty' in my quilts (like nanacompany and pretty by hand) but they never seem to turn out quite 'right' so this quilt is my *a study in pretty* (any sherlock fans out there? study in pink?)

i went to my fabric closet and started pulling lots of different prints in the low volume/pink/vintage-y category, i was going to choose white for my background triangles, but while i was searching through my fabric i came across a few yards of the stone-y coloured polka-dot by bonnie and camille and thought it went  better with the look than the white would have.

this quilt involved a lot of unpicking and i would say it's probably the hardest quilt i have made! and because i like to be different, i decided to add in a few patchwork hexagons (i seriously want to patchwork all the things at the minute) i think they might be my favourite part of the quilt! 

i used a cute little butterfly print (that totally looks like spools of thread) for the back. it's a print from flo's garden (i think) and it fell into the low volume/pink/vintage-y category, so it was the perfect match.

on nearly all of my quilts i do a stipple or swirly loops, this time i wanted to try something different and since i was completely out of my comfort zone anyway, i decided to go for a continuous figure of eight quilting. i used this tutorial by stitched in color which i highly recommend if you fancy trying it! there was a few blips but once you get into the rhythm of it it is really enjoyable.

i'm not sure i really achieved the 'pretty' look that i was going for, but i'm really happy that i went out of my comfort zone and tried something different (especially the patchwork hexagons *love*) all the triangles now has me wanting to make a triangle quilt!

rachael x

linking up with fabric tuesday

...oh and you can find the wonderful pattern here