I recently participated in the open wide pouch swap on Instagram. All the swappers made an Open Wide Pouch from the wonderful pattern by Anna of Noodlehead. I’ve made several of these and I adore this pattern…so well written and it produces a brilliant pouch. When I read that my swap buddy loved birds I knew straight away that I wanted to give this Geometric Paper Pieced Bird pattern from Quiet Play a go. I’ve done foundation paper piecing once before and it’s a lot of fun. I love how accurate it is! I need to remember not to be too stingy with my pieces though as there were a few I had to unpick because they weren’t quite big enough. I quilted the pouch with pebbles and feel like I’m starting to get the hang of them. I do need to work on having more size variations as they all seem to end up about the same size even when I’m trying to make them different.

For this swap we had to send along 3 items with our pouch. To go with the Geometric Bird Pouch, I decided to send some fat quarters, chocolate and zips because they’re always handy when making pouches. Once I had it all together I had a read of my swap buddies Instagram and noticed that she liked buttons so I also added a selection from my stash. You can’t go wrong with fabric, chocolate and haberdashery can you?!

It was hard to part with the pouch so making one for myself is now on my to do list. Do you find it hard to part with your swap makes?