Another perfect swap pillow and

So, you might have heard of the Swap°pen group on flickr. It is a group solely for people in Europe who speak German - since all other groups are english-based and mostly in the US, this is a wonderful exception. The ladies there also make gorgeous pillows which is the main reason I am participating :)
Here are the pillows I made in the other two "pillow rounds":

Swap #5 is over and has proven a somewhat challenging round for me. Not only did my partner - who I was making the pillow for - drop out 2 weeks before the deadline, but I was also moving at the same time, dealing with a ton of deadlines at work, a faulty internet connection at home (so no internet at all), the need to install everything at home (I let that one go pretty quickly, light and heat are obviously important but getting a bed can easily wait for two months while I sleep on a mattress) and the need to find another room mate asap because apartments in Munich are almost impossible to finance on your own (unless you are a millionaire - then you probably bought an apartment here anyway). Oh, and making christmas presents (see last post of my parents' quilt).

 So, the swap was a constant inner rant of "OMG, I am totally going to be late" and "I should have never signed up for this" and "What was I thinking, moving and signing up for this at the same time before christmas". I did manage to make it at the very last minute (and there were even packages delivered after mine) but I pulled some allnighters to get it done and I love my sleep. Thankfully, everything worked out while sewing, I didn't run out of fabrics and I didn't make any major sewing mistakes.

in progress

 And voilà, Miriam's pillow was made, packed and delivered and has been living with her ever since. I leaned heavily on her mosaic for inspiration and guidance (the mosaic has links to the originals).

I also managed to get - yet again - the most beautiful pillow in the swap. This one was made by Andrea of Quiltmanufaktur and it is living in wonderful company now with its three siblings from the other two swaps.

I don't know if I will be participating in the next round yet. It will be another pillow round but based on the X Factor Swap so that should make things easier. I guess we will see :)

The latest bee quilt

Happy new year!

This is one of the very few quilts I managed to get done in 2014 - this one was just in time for christmas and was gifted properly. The inspiration came from the QAL by Material Girl Quilts - though I must admit that I followed no instructions and made the blocks up myself. But there is only so much you can do with HST so this one resembles her quilt a lot. 

The lovely ladies at Fleißige Beenchen helped me with this quilt - half of the blocks were done by them. I free motion quilted each block on its own, added borders between the blocks and joined them with the quilt-as-you-go method. The quilting was fun like this way, but the block joining was so much more tedious then usual. I don't know if I will use this method again in the foreseeable future.

And now: pictures of quilting :)