"Granddaughters' Flower Garden"...Finished!

What fun this was, creating a most nostalgic contribution to the Alliance for American Quilts' "New from Old" fundraising quilt contest.

My cousin Tracy's painting of our grandmother's housewas a joy to work with, but it presented some challenges, too.
The heavy brown vertical lines in the house needed to be integrated with those pastel 1930's Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks I was dying to use. So there was a balancing act involved, employing value, line, repetition, and a large dose of whimsy to bring it all together.

Here's a detail to show how I finished the "frame" around the central image. That 4mm silk ribbon that is blanket-stitched in place was hand-dyed by Pat Winter. Her ribbon is always "just the thing" I need. Thanks again, Pat!

So have a look at the completed quilt....

I added a little machine quilting to the center....nothing obtrusive, just enough to keep the surface secured.
I'm quite happy with the concept and execution, though I would love to have another go at it sometime...

I do hope you will consider entering a 16" X 16" quilt of your own. Mine is not eligible for the contest, as I am currently serving on the board of the Alliance....and I am so happy to support their fundraiser with this quilt (all the contest quilts will be put up for bid on Ebay in the fall of 2010.)
...but YOU all could win some really substantial prizes, including a $5000 "sit down" model Handi-Quilter machine.
Also, the quilts will be hung at American Quilter Society, the National Quilting Association, and International Quilt Festival shows this year, getting quite a bit of attention!
So get your work out there, compete for some valuable prizes, and support a cause dear to all of us quilters. What does "New from Old" mean to you?....

"Granddaughters' Flower Garden"...Painting Flowers

I didn't want my flowers to compete too much with the Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks in the border. More like they were "growing from the same soil"...

...so I kept to the same 1930's color palette.
I used a diluted Tsukineko ink to get the color on them.

Once they dried, I've been playing with their arrangement on the quilt.

Click on the photo to get a better view. I've placed the brown silk ribbon around the quilt to give myself a visual on how it will look bound.
These flowers are still pretty subtle looking, blending in perhaps too much.
But we can fix that....!

I usually don't have trouble parting with my fund-raising quilts (this is for the Alliance for American Quilts), but this one might be a little harder to send off....

"Granddaughters' Flower Garden"

"New from Old", the theme for this year's Alliance for American Quilts contest, lends itself to so many interesting interpretations.
Three of my fellow bloggers are already at work on their entries, and you can see them here:

--Barbara Curiel's embellished Madonna on a vintage textile is already so beautiful.

--Amy Munson is again beading a wonderful piece (her "Crazy for Beads" won an Honorable Mention last year and is featured in the April/May 2010 issue of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine)

--Gerry Kreuger is creating a fascinating piece linking her grandmother and her granddaughter.
At the bottom of the link given to Gerry's blog here are links to her other posts about her contest entry.

If there are more of you participating in "New from Old" and blogging about it, do please let me know!

The connection between my cousin Tracy and me to our mutual grandmother has formed the basis of my own contest piece. I am combining some 1930's "Grandmother's Flower Garden" blocks with a beautiful watercolor sketch that Tracy made especially for this quilt. It is her rendition of our grandma's house, a place we met every Sunday for family get-togethers when we were children.

Here is her painting transferred to EQ printable cotton lawn and I am squaring it up.

I've learned that transferred images just mysteriously will stretch or distort while I work with them. So immediately I interface them now.

I've also learned that having images like this in the center of a quilt requires that they have a little extra batting behind them. I really don't know why. At this point I just add the batting before I even sew the transferred fabric image onto my quilt.

Placing the batting inside of the folded under seams means they won't show through the image on the front, too.

In this picture I am just laying out the background fabrics beneath the hexagonal border blocks. The printed image will go on after the background is sewn down with a machine zigzag in clear thread.

To sew on the border blocks, I decided a nice machine buttonhole stitch would do the trick. Plus, I wanted to try out the new 30/wt. Aurofil cotton thread I just got to see how it would do in this application.
Well, it is WONDERFUL thread, substantial but not too heavy, smooth and yummy with no lint. I'm a convert! In the above picture I was figuring out which size stitch to use. Once I did, I sewed down all those blocks.

Fast forward.....

A granddaughter's flower garden would not be complete without a whole bunch of embellished flowers, now, would it?
I don't know how much these border blocks are even going to show by the time this is finished; I expect there will be many, many blooms all over them. Lots of "gardening" is ahead for me from here....