Anna Maria Horner swap quilt

Many months ago, my friend Anne and I agreed to do a private swap. We had seen the Anna Maria Horner swap being organised on Instagram but wanted a longer deadline (as it happens, this was a good idea because it took us the best part of a year to get organised!).

This mini quilt is what I created for Anne. Her favourite colour is grey, and I knew I wanted to get lots of different AMH fabrics into the quilt.  About halfway through the year I learned how to make yoyos / Suffolk puffs and I wanted to incorporate them into a quilt that was modern and a bit different. Thus the idea of this round mini quilt was born.

First I made many yoyos using a wide range of different AMH fabrics collected over the years. For the detail people, I used a Clover yoyo maker in size large (45mm). I arranged them in a rainbow-ish way, in a large hexagon shape.

Then I created the background by quilting a solid grey fabric with grey thread (I used a rayon thread on the top because I wanted a bit of shine, and trusty aurifil on the back). The grid is reasonably dense, spaced about 1/2" apart, but was freehand quilted using my walking foot (no marking lines!). Once the quilted part was done, I hand stitched the yoyos to the background, just catching the top layer of fabric.

The fabric on the back of the quilt is another AMH design, which I had stashed for a while. I added a wee hanging sleeve and even got a batten cut to the right size and added a hanging loop for easy display.

Finally, my fairly tongue-in-cheek name for the quilt, and a label. This was a really fun little quilt to make and it definitely hasn't cured my yoyo addiction!