Flowers and stars

This quilt.......cost me a lot of nerves.  I was very difficult  to make and I was perhaps a little bit over ambitious to tackle a quilt with so many inset seams early on. 'Flowers and stars' uses a design from Kaffe Fassett's book 'Country Garden Quilts'. I love the way the intersecting points of the blocks form stars.

Flowers and Stars

I used a lot Kaffe Fasset and Philip Jacobs fabrics again here but changed the design somewhat as I don't like the border around the original quilt from the book. I wanted to make it really big so I thought I create 36 blocks instead of 25 but that plan quickly (very quickly) went out of the window.

I cut an enormous amount of fabric and I think I spend a whole day doing it. Then came the problem about where to lay it out. At first I my bed as a design board as one doesn't have to bend down so much. I then realised that I couldn't move it without having to start from scratch (and I had to sleep at some point). Well I thought I was clever and bagged each block of the 25 in a separate bag. But that didn't work so I ended up having the re-design it anyway. 

The first block I sew took me a staggering 75 minutes, and the second and the third. At that point I was getting a tat frustrated. So I left it for a while. Then I picked it up again and my block sewing time became somewhat shorter but the thing was still frustrating and I wasn't sure about it at all.

So I left it lying in my spare room for weeks giving it dirty looks whenever I went to the wardrobe (so really every day..) .

Then my sister called and announced that she and her family would visit which meant the nightmare-quilt-in-the-making either had to get done, binned or vanish in some other shape or form. So I gave it another go and surprise surprise I managed the sew the remaining 2/3 of it in two afternoon sessions. I have absolutely no idea what happened in the meantime but something must have clicked in my brain and I finally mastered those horrible inset seams.

Needles to say now I absolutely love it and am already planning to do another one in very dark and moody colours .

The finished size is 1.6 m square or 63 inches square.
I bought most of the fabric for this quilt at cotton patch and Tikki London.

I fussy cut flowers for most of the blocks and love in particular the Bekah and the Brokat Floral designs. The Stars are mostly made out of two contrasting shades of dots.