Dried Flowers Quilt Top is Finished!

Some quilts come about from sheer whimsy. Completely unplanned, nonetheless sparked  by something deep within our conscience, we feel there is no choice but to start stitching. Only later do we gradually realize that there needs to be an end to the story! Picture me scribbling madly on notebook paper, drawing up potential layout ideas. This of course after impulsively coming up with these flower blocks! Hmm.. What to do, what to do....

Dried Flowers quilt top

This quilt was one of those deceptively simple, but madcap sort of starts and no-one is more surprised than me at how it has turned out! I'm not sure if this is a end-of-the-summer-flower-garden or an ode to spring but, whatever! It's all good! I am loving the use-it-up feel of starting with cast-off circles and then winding my way through the depths of the stash totes, and then finally, having a play with a bit more formal looking applique! Where were the seeds of this quilt hiding and why didn't I even realize they were always there, lying in wait?

A closer look at the coin strips

Having slowly plodded through {most} of the details for the applique work, all that was needed was to add on the outside border strips. Then I impulsively decided to applique the small orangey squares at the corners too. The brighter coral flowers in the center rows were overshadowing the poor Dried Flower blocks. These little spots of color seemed to help bring a little more focus back to the sweet looking flowers. Plus, it felt whimsical and that's usually a win in my book.

The little add-ons at the corners....

I'm so pleased with the improv. cut coin strips in between the flowers. It's getting to be a default decision, adding in strippy free-cut piecing to so many of my quilts.  It might seem silly or maybe even pointless to sew them with such blendy fabrics, but the resulting texture absolutely thrills me on such an elemental level. How could I resist and why would I even want to to try....

Such a feel-good sort of finish!

Figuring out the side borders was always going to be a little tricky. I had a {perfectly perfect} brown fabric with a subtle stripe that hopped on board almost from the beginning. I knew it had to go somewhere, and eventually that 'somewhere' became obvious as an outside border. The horizontal applique border strips just kept insisting that they needed to spill out into that border. Okay, fine, but I didn't want to break up the flow up those subtle stripes either. So, yeah. Nobody was ever going to notice but me, and we all know how these things wind up. Gotta make it happen so it won't drive us insane later! Oh I should have, could have, knew it would have been better the other way.... Right?

Trying to decide measurements for the border...

It finally came down to cutting the horizontal brown strips at exactly the width of the sewn together flower block/coin strips; ie, the current width of the quilt. Then I measured {and measured again}, finally cutting the cream applique background just long enough to extend beyond, and over, into the outside border. So yes, I sewed the horizontal brown strips to the flower/coin strips in a huge big unit, then cut and sewed the outside borders onto the sides of the quilt. At that point, I then unpinned the folded up ends of the cream fabric and laid the excess lengths out over into the outside border. I used a paper template that I had drawn up to gauge where to cut the 'triangle' shape, and then finished appliqueing the rest of that strip down.*whew!  So much trouble for a a very stubborn idea.

Where the center strips extend into the side borders...

It looks a little ruffled in the picture, but in reality it lays quite flat. Maybe if I wouldn't leave my quilt tops laying around for awhile before taking pictures or even, better yet, ironed things more carefully? You wouldn't be scratching your heads at any or all of the quilts that do {amazingly} end up looking fairly square around here...

In the initial layout drawing, I had drawn two stacked circles where each of the black circles are, kind of like a colon, but it didn't look right. Eventually I determined that only one circle was needed but that it needed to be larger. Thankfully there was just enough of that particular fabric left to cut new, larger circles because for some reason that was the very best black fabric available from the stash. You know how black has so many different tones? This fabric was a super subtle woven, but spot on in intensity. With so very much brown represented in the quilt, I definitely didn't want a too-saturated black to come off as jarring and strident. And it couldn't be a modern or contemporary print. Fabric is important to the feel and vibe in a quilt. I care about these things quite a lot actually, as do many of you!

Now it'll be time to work on the baby girl quilt which was made up of the cast-off coin strips from this project. Only a week or so till the shower! Linking up with Wendy's Peacock Party!