Wow, wow and triple WOW!!

Some serious squealing and silly behaviour was witnessed in my house this afternoon when Hannah came home from a shopping trip with her dad and called out to me on arriving home “mummy… we bought you a present…”
…When I saw that it was a box from the USA I knew it could only be one thing and one thing only – my highly anticipated Doll Quilt Swap package – and I was right!! … (Not the one I had sent off to my partner, but the one that my secret stalker designed especially for me.)

Boy oh BOY I could not wait to rip that box open and see what quilty goodness had been sent to me!! Talk about feeling like a little kid on Christmas morning!! (Ok ok, so I know that to all you people who aren’t involved in doll quilt swap that I am completely strange – I accept that…. but it was seriously seriously exciting!!)

I could NOT believe my eyes when I opened the box and was greeted with this absolute masterpiece:

Sorry guys – this is a terrible photo!!

Made by the uber talented Carol, who goes by the name Mamacjt over on flickr.
– I highly recommend that you check out both her blog and her flickr pool, because she is one incredibly talented women!!

Isn’t it absolutely breathtakingly incredible? So detailed and creative!! I will show you some of the detail in a minute, but first let me just explain something about the Doll Quilt Swap… There are about 200 people from all over the world involved. That means 200+ quilts for this, the 10th, round. There are some seriously SERIOUSLY talented people in the group (as you can see from above) – and I felt rather intimidated to be a part of it I must say…

…Well out of all the quilts that I had seen finished, this was without a doubt at the top of my “want” list and it was added to my Flickr favourite photos as soon as I saw the photo (and long before I knew that it was coming to me)!! This is my comment that I made 2 months ago under her finished photo in the photo pool:

Haha – so as you can see – sometimes completely shameless begging does pay off 😉

But the awesomeness of the package did not stop at this breathtakingly quilt. No no… Here is the entire package:

As you can see – a certain person could not keep her hands off my goodies bless her

I must say that Carol is a freakishly good stalker and also a very comprehensive swap buddy!! She really went above and beyond with the extras and thought not just of me, but she also had presents for both of my girls – WOW!!
– There is a beautiful dress that she made which was addressed to Abbie, a charm pack of fabric, a gorgeous doll (that I’m also guessing she made), some candy, a pattern that she wrote for a Christmas tree skirt, and lastly a princess sticker book for Hannah (which didn’t get included in the photo because they had already found a new home in the toilet – for Hannah’s toilet training reward chart – and I forgot to get it back for the photo )
I am feeling so SO lucky (and kind of badly guilty because I didn’t sent my swap partner any extras – I could not afford the postage otherwise – So sorry partner!!!!!)

Here is Hannah already sampling the goodies:

Abbie – “Hey that’s MY dress…”

– I let Hannah try on the dress briefly before putting it away for when Abbie is bigger… (and by the way – that is the offending bean bag).

The quilt kind of tickled Hannah’s fancy as much as it did mine – and in no short time just from her “looking” one of the car buttons fell off – typical… So as a result the quilt was prompty rescued from her clutches and now hangs in pride of place on my pin board, to inspire me as I sew:

And here are the promised close ups of the detail… although apologies, these are yucky night time shots because I ran out of time to take daylight ones (and I’m far too impatient to wait until tomorrow to post this 😉 )

haha these remind me of home…

love this little dog – kind of looks like it could be Izzy!

Pretty blessed huh. I loved this quilt from the moment I saw the photo of it – but never even dreamed that I would be the lucky recipient!!

Thank you SO much Carol!! It will be treasured!!