When Pigs Fly Into My Mailbox

I have been participating in a block swap with my Sparkly Chicken friends.  Yesterday, my first block arrived in the mail.  A pig on point!  With wings!  Made from bright pink hand-dyes!

(Please forgive the thready mess on my design wall.)

It's a Fat Cat design.  And it came with this adorable embroidered hippo.  My friend, Beth, who lives in South Africa and blogs here made the pig and sent the hippo.



The story that came with it is "A Hippo Swallowed a Girl."  There is lots more information about it here at Tambani Textiles.

For January, the block I sent out was supposed to have a beach theme.  So what is better than an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini?





Only trouble was, I had envisioned a red bikini with yellow dots and couldn't find anything in my stash of dots and spots like that.  Which is really surprising because I've been collecting spots and polka dots for years.

  So I took some red with white polka dots and colored them yellow with Tsukineko inks.  Then I fused the pieces onto the beach background and stitched around the edges.


This month, my mission was a "Happy House" block.  the colors were supposed to be blues, yellows, greens and purples.

I took a house block from EQ7 and played around with it until I was happy and made this:

I used some of the fabric from the flour-resist experiments for the front walk.  And because it was for a Sparkly Chicken friend, I had to add some chicks and chickens.