The start of a new flower quilt

This wasn't what I was planning to write about today, I was going to show you around my garden a little bit, but last night I had the urge to start something new! I think it must have been me saying yesterday that my works in progress pile was going down, clearly I had to remedy that immediately!

There's a little girl I want to make a quilt for, and I've been wondering for a week or so what to make her. When I have a project in mind but haven't decided what exactly it's going to be, I normally find that different possibilities seem to go round and round my head last thing at night. I knew I wanted to make something quite flowery and yesterday evening I sat down and had a little browse through my 'Patchwork' Board on Pinterest to see if anything popped out at me. This popped out at me:



http://pinterest.com/pin/65654107038900058/

They're from a blog called fiberliscious and this is how they ended up:

I don't think I'll use the posies in the same way on this kind of background, but isn't this a gorgeous quilt?

I love projects that make use of really small scraps of fabrics, I have quite a lot of scraps! Especially flowery scraps perfect for this. So I did a quick bit of gathering and cutting last night. And this morning I got up early to make a proper start. The link from the picture didn't really go into a lot of detail about how these flowers were constructed, so I've no idea if I went about it the best way, but this is what I did:

I cut out a hexagon - just a rough, freehand one, and sewed it down on to a piece of scrap fabric.

Then I sewed on a small strip, right sides together, along one edge of the hexagon.

And then ironed that strip back flat...

This covered up the raw edge on that side of the hexagon. And then I sewed another strip on, again right sides together. With this one I folded over a narrow hem on the short side to avoid a raw edge there, but I found as I built it up further I hardly ever needed to do this again.

Then ironed it back over...

And trimmed it...

And it just carried on like this, all the way round - right sides together and then ironed over, covering any raw edges as I went...

So here it is with one layer built up all around the original hexagon...

And then I started a second layer in just the same way...

And carried on until it was the size I wanted. Here it is...

I sewed all the way round the outer edges and then cut it out.



I'm planning on sewing them down on to my quilt with a tight zigzag stitch to cover those outer raw edges. The children don't think they look anything like flowers though, I'm hoping they will when they're on stalks with a few leaves. I think I'll need seven more 'flowers', so six more to go...

Back tomorrow, Sally.