I finished this quilt in early February, 2017 – just in the for the Quilt Show.

I did a few small English paper-pieced projects and found I really liked the technique. I saw a pattern online that requires thousands of hexagons so I thought this quilt would be a good test of whether or not I still liked the technique. I do!

I had quite a bit of my favourite fabrics left from my Hubble quilt and I decided to use that for the blossoms. Just as the fabric line was taken off the market I was able to get some additional printed fabric for the borders. Pat and I took a long time to decide on the placement of the blossoms on each block. There were a lot of switches made during the process and we used black and white photos a lot.

The blossoms were hand stitched together and I used my machine (blanket stitch) to applique them to the background. Pat suggested off- setting the blocks with sashing. I quilted each blossom using a sunflower motif (44 of them) and I used a free-motion meander to fill in the background of each block.

I used a leaf motif (93 of them) in the sashing and inner border, but for the outer border I used a spiral motif (44 sets). After picking out a few of those spiral motifs on one side (because I caught the back of the quilt in the border) I reached a point where I couldn’t face another spiral so I added the word “Blossoms” into the border.

I learned how to use crayons on fabric at a demo night at the Guild. I used one of my favourites from that demo as a label for this project.

I gave this quilt to Elizabeth for her birthday!