Now that my swap partner Elaine has received my mug rug, I can finally reveal :-) Elaine's swap info told me she liked rainbow colours, light backgrounds and texture; a little bit of Flickr stalking later, I realised that she had lots of hexie projects in her favourites. Of course, being still in the honeymoon period with my Accuquilt Go! Baby (can it really be a honeymoon if there is no end in sight?) I had easy access to hexies so I decided that this was the way to go. Better still, I had recently received my rainbow charms (thanks to my QAL partner-in-quilting Jennifer) so it was really a no brainer.
I took out my Go! Baby hexie die and decided to use the medium size one. (If you're interested in receiving free patterns/the Accuquilt newsletter click here to sign up!). Five minues and I had all my hexies (I seriously love my Baby!) You'll all remember my first attempt at this mug rug - it suffered from over-trimming enthusiasm and I also wasn't totally happy with my machine piecing accuracy.
So I went back to basics and decided to recut (because, why wouldn't I? lol!!) to hand sew these babies next time round. Happily, I found perfect size paper hexie templates on this site - I printed off some sheets, cut them out and away I went, a few pleasant evenings on the sofa while I watched re-runs of The Sopranos (and yes, 10 years later it is still as good!).
My mind then turned to the back...for some reason, I had in my head that I wanted this to be a double sided mug rug, but I didn't have a fabric print that totally worked for the backing and I knew I wanted to do some simple echo quilting in the white space around the rainbow hexies, which was not going to work with a different design on the back.
In the end I decided to do a wonky rainbow log cabin block on the back. I tried to emulate a traditional log cabin block by keeping cool colours at one side and warms on the other and I used a linen/cotton mix to give a little extra texture to the sashing..
I got over the quilting issue by quilting each side onto its own bit of batting. I use Warm and White which is a nice, fine batting and putting the two sides together did not make it unduly bulky. I then bound using my Its a
Hoot dotty grey fabric which remains still my all time favourite binding fabric. Lastly, I needed to write my Haiku which was the theme for this swap, so I stuck to the rainbow theme for that, and then I made a little card with a row of rainbow flags (thank you Susan for the idea) to write it in.
Then yesterday, I received this package from JohannaBF all the way from Florida:
