Sunday, November 18, 2007

Trientalis europaea

I have been struggling with some crazy log cabin flower blocks lately. It took a while to get my head around the concept - starting with an uneven triangle and stitching wedges and uneven strips around it in a haphazard log cabin fashion, having to discard a lot of offcuts, seemed to go very much against the grain (pardon the pun!) of my early lessons in quilting where following the grain of the fabric, cutting precisely and making good use of even the tiniest scrap of fabric has been the most important rules of all. After a while I got into the spirit of it all and it became a lot easier and more fun along the way, so here they are, my three flowers stitched together to form a table-runner.
It started out as a christmassy thing with the flowers being white poinsettias, but I couldn't resist adding some blues and teals, and in my mind the flowers have now become Arctic starflowers, making the runner suitable for all year usage. Never mind that the real ones have six petals and mine only have four - I'm allowed some artistic freedom, right? ;-)

I was going to crop the picture, but why not leave some hints around the edges of what is going around outside my quilting realm. A bit of laundry waiting to be dealt with, some wine wanting to be drunk (although some of the bottles are empty already...) and my craft box of paints and brushes waiting under the table for when inspiration strikes. A wider angle would have revealed a lot more mess, but I'm slowly, slowly bringing my home into some semblance of order - throwing out stuff I never use and pairing down to get more room for the things I really want to spend time on. I have some great projects in mind that will bring that box up on the table soon, but first I'llhave to deal with some of this domestic mess that seems to accumulate out of nowhere... I am going to spend some time quilting my flowers first, though. I have added some french knots to the centers, but it looks like it needs something more, maybe some beads? I'll

do the quilting first, and see what it tells me.

1 comment :

Joyce said...

I really like your crazy flowers. It's so much fun to flout the quilting police with wonky blocks. They look very lively and fun.