Honeycomb spin and flying geese all made with batiks!

Several months ago the lovely people at RJR Fabrics sent me some Jinny Beyer Malam batiks to play with.  I made two quilts from these batiks - Honeycomb spin and a flying geese table runner.

Firstly - Honeycomb spin.
I learnt to made this quilt in a class at Nancy's Stitch Studio in Wellington, New Zealand.  Anna Hicks was the tutor, and we had a great time using the modern hexies technique of wrapping fabric around paper templates to form the shape, and then removing the papers and gluing the hexies to the background fabric.  The spiral quilting was the final step and it secured the hexies to the background.

I deliberately staggered my hexies from dark to light to get the shading effect. The batiks worked really well for this.

the background fabric is Radiant Gradients by Hoffman

If it looks like a lot of hexies, you'd be right. I must have used about 350.

I used King Tut variegated thread for the spiral quilting and love the circles it created.

The back looks pretty good too:

This is an out of print piece by Amelia Caruso - the same artist who designed the border fabric I'm using on my la passacaglia. We turned the edges back and made facings rather than doing a normal binding.

The finished size is 25" x 40".  I'm really pleased with how this quilt turned out, and will hang it on the wall in my house.


Secondly, I made a table runner with some of the leftovers:
I've always loved blues and greens, so I decided to make a blue and green table runner for my hall table.  I didn't really have a pattern, but I knew I wanted to use flying geese.  I only have 2 Bloc-loc flying geese tools - the 1.5" x 3" finished, and the 2" x 4" finished, and I used both of them.

I did a bit of algebra, and worked out that 3 of the big flying geese would be 12" finished, and 4 of the small flying geese would be 12" finished, so I made sets of various colour combinations.

Once the mat was the right size I hand quilted it with Aurifil 28wt and big stitches.

I used some of the leftover pieces on the back, and gave it a random binding, because by then I was running out of blues and greens.

The finished size is 11.5" x 36" and it fits perfectly on my hall table.

RFR Fabrics have kindly agreed to let me give away some Malam batiks to one lucky person on Instagram.  So if you're on Instagram and follow both me and RJR Fabrics, you can enter the competition on Instagram.

I realise not everyone is on Instagram, so I'm going to do a separate giveaway just for blog readers next week.