Finally finished

Sunday Stash giveaway open here

Last July (I think) I shared a photo of this chest:

I sanded it down and then left it in the garage until earlier this month. Tobit then painted it and together we worked on decoupaging an old French world map to the drawers:

It was pretty simple but hugely effective, the children happily spent time spotting countries and doing their best pronunciation of them in French. I also lined the drawers with some vintage wallpaper I’ve had stashed for a while:It now sits in our freshly decorated hallway (fresh being last summer) and is a great place for dumping stuff. I noticed that very quickly the top looked a little bit scuffed and as I already had plans for making a runner for it; this prompted me to get on with it. I’d done a fabric pull: And then after looking at the chest I decided to pull some fabrics that would highlight some of the colours in the map rather than playing it safe and using the same colour as the paint.  I had a charm pack of Spring Bloom by Bella Caronia for Windham Fabrics: Not your usual charm pack though; containing one of each print (15 in total) the pieces were 5.5″ x 5.25″ but that didn’t matter for my plan, the colours were perfect (although a couple of the greens were missing as I used them in my Marcelle Medallion).  I drew up a 4″ kaleidoscope template in touchdraw and got paper piecing.  I used Kona Silver for the background: I love how it turned out: In hindsight I could have made the template 4.5″ and it would have finished a little larger but it’s no problem: If our hallway was larger it would have been possible to get a photo of the runner and the colours in the map at the same time: The colours in Africa are so vibrant and so are the colours in the fabric, I’m so glad I went for the ‘unsafe’ option.  I quilted the runner with Aurifil 2530 50 weight: I bound it with the same stripe that I used on the Whale quilt; Paris, stripe in charcoal,selvedge reads Vive Gade:

Now I’m thinking about what else might need a runner…