"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....