.: Down Under Doll Quilt Swap round 4 - the start :.

Lovely Charlotte put out a call on instagram, to encourage sign-ups for round 4 of the Down Under Doll Quilt Swap.  It's a mini-quilt swap coordinated through Flickr for sew-ers in Australia and New Zealand.  Partners are secret - meaning I know who I am sewing for (but it's a surprise for her), but I do not know who is sewing for me.

My partner put up a mosaic on Flickr - thank goodness - and mentioned a few favourite/not favourite colours too.

Based on all that, I am making "Starburst Spools", a gorgeous paper-pieced pattern by Charise Creates. 

I loved choosing all the fabrics for this - four different fabrics each in blue, green, pink (which was very nearly purple instead) and orange - plus eight different spool-end fabrics.  Initially I was going to use different low volume fabrics for the background, but I was worried that they would detract from the main pattern, so kept it to just the Architextures print (which I love). 

The one fabric I would go back and change is the "green" spool - I really wish I'd fussy-cut a different colour name instead, from the same fabric - so that the green fabric said "blue" (or another colour) instead.  That would be kind of fun. 

Everything came together pretty well, but I will not lie - the spool-ends nearly defeated me! - they are tiny and I kept misjudging the size of the long skinny piece needed for either side of the spool-end.  So there was a lot of unpicking and re-sewing going on. 

Now that the top is finished, I am going to leave it a little while and think about backing and binding. 

Hope your weekend was great.  xoxo cat