Balloon Flowers

Last week Sue shared pictures from a Whisper Challenge.  If you followed along on Facebook, Barbara Wise guessed  Sue's quilt to be the Balloon Flowers.  So today we are sharing some process photos.  This is the inspiration photo that Sue used in creating her quilt.

The technique used for the background is one developed by Terry Kramzar.  It has the look of square in a square blocks but without any seams.  The blocks are backed with fusible batting, quilted, then the  small squares are appliqued on.  If you look at her website, you'll see this technique as a background for many of her quilts.

She also has her own ruler to make placement of the square easy.

After completing the background, the stems and leaves for the flowers were added.

The flowers were cut from gradient fabric that came from Colorways by Vicki Welsh. After cutting out the shapes, details were added with Inktense pencils.

The stems and leaves were stitched first, then the flowers were placed and stitched.

Here's what the back looked like after all the stitching before the backing was added.

The final quilting is stitch in the ditch between all the squares.  Below is the finished quilt.

The process made this a fun quilt to make.  Check out Terry's website for examples of how she uses this technique in her work.

Whisper Challenge

Well, here we are again.  A couple of months have gone by since our last blog post.  It seems once you get out of the habit, it's easy to let it slide.  But, this week Sue has results of an art group challenge to share.  For an annual challenge, our art bee decided to repeat a "whisper" challenge that we had done the year before.  It works like a game of telephone in that the first person chooses a photo and makes a quilt inspired by the photo.  Then their quilt gets passed to the next person, who makes theirs based on the first one, and so on.  Only the first person sees the picture, and each succeeding person sees only the quilt prior to theirs.  It is certainly interesting to see the results!

So, this was the inspirational photo for this go-round.

The next photo shows the first 2 quilts in the sequence.

As the first quilt maker explained, she was inspired by what was missing from the photo - specifically the leaves that had already fallen from the tree.  So she featured 5 different types of leaves in her quilt.  The second person focused on the fact that there were 5 items and came up with her design.

Quilts 3, 4, and 5 follow pretty closely with the colorful segments of quilt 2.  Quilt 3's colorful circles are representative of beach balls (or hard candies?); the beach balls inspired a beach umbrella with segmented colors; and the umbrella inspired colorful balloons.

In quilt # 6, the balloons inspired balloon flowers.  The balloon flowers became fractured flowers. And the fractured flowers led to an Asian inspired quilt.  What do you think?  Interesting transitions, eh?  It's fun to see how one piece led into the next, especially when you hear about the thought process of the maker.  

Have you guessed which quilt is Sue's?  If you have a guess, leave a comment on this post!  She'll do another post and share some process photos from making the quilt.