May Flowers

The art quilt bee that Sue belongs to issues a challenge every other month to make a 12" square quilt that interprets a theme.  The theme for May was "flowers".  Here's her story of how she created the finished piece.

I started with an approximately fat quarter yard piece of fabric that was already printed with the birds on a branch screen.  I intended to use it for another challenge, but didn't get to it before the deadline, so decided to revise the plan to fit the flowers theme.

First I overprinted with the cherry blossom screen.  I made small appliques from a hand dyed osnaburg fabric to fuse over the birds that were part of the original bird on a branch print. The part on the right side was extra that I didn't need.  I also printed some single cherry blossoms around the perimeter, keeping to the size for the 12" square dimension.  The cherry blossom branch was printed in white with some pink blended in; the single blossoms were printed in pink.   The extra fabric was trimmed off.

With the printing and birds fused in place, the next step was adding a border.  I had purchased a batik that I thought was the perfect border fabric, but because the color was so close to the purple background, it needed something to separate the two.

I used a darker blue batik to make a flange around the center block that gave some definition and separation between it and the border.  Then it was time for some quilting.  I layered it with a fusible batting but not backing because I intended to do some hand stitching and didn't want the back side to show.  But first I did some free motion quilting with the machine.

This close-up shows the machine stitching outlining the branches and blossoms, and also the start of the hand stitching.  I used a darker pink floss on the larger blossoms and a lighter pink on the smaller ones in a star shape.  Then I added french knots at the end of each point. 

I also did some stitching to add definition to the birds.  After adding the backing, label and sleeve, it was finished.