Sunflower Mini Quilt

You might remember way back in February, when I made my hanging Bat Mini Quilt, that I mentioned I had started the year wanting to add some variety to the shape/size/design of my Mini Quilts (if you're interested, find all the ones I've made so far at the bottom of my 'My Quilts' page). My bat quilt covered most of my aims on this front, but I still felt the urge to make a mini quilt which was long and thin in shape. At the time the obvious subject matter for such a quilt had seemed a giraffe, but that idea wasn't really inspiring me, and so it's been in the back of my mind ever since. At some time in the last couple of months the idea of a Sunflower Mini Quilt popped into my head instead - probably at about the time that we finally gave up on any of our real sunflowers growing this year!

And I finally got round to making it last week.

I made it on a long, thin, vintage table runner. So that I kept the lace edging, rather than binding it in any way, I 'backed' it with a covered piece of wool, the exact size of the main runner fabric.

Here's the long, oblong wool piece in the centre with a larger linen piece underneath...

Then I just folded in the corners...

And ironed all the edges over, using a little spray basting glue to help hold them down (pins would do too!)

Then I used more basting spray to stick it to the back of my runner before quilting this fabric sandwich and adding the applique sunflower.

I did think about making the sunflower as a 'dresden plate' rather than applique, but I loved the wools in my recent sunflower cushions so decided to stick with them.

And, of course, all my Mini Quilts have some words or a quote on them. A sunflower gave me lots of possibilities here, but after browsing various quotes associated with sunflowers, I decided on this...

If you do a Pinterest search for advice from a sunflower, you'll see various gems of advice that a sunflower might give us! These were my favourites.

The advice also got me thinking - what else would give good advice? Maybe a tree? Or a cloud, rainbow, bee, butterfly, dinosaur, mermaid, the sea...? Or maybe a real person in history? It feels likes there's a child friendly art/writing project in there! What thing/creature/person do you think would give the best advice?

And speaking of advice, gardening advice this time, if any of you were looking at my tomatoes in my last post and thinking I really needed to cut off masses of those leaves then you'll be pleased to hear I have.

Thanks Emma!

Basically I had been growing a lot of beautiful tomato leaves rather than tomatoes! I usually 'forget' about pinching out the side shoots on tomatoes, it seems to be a blind spot with me. Not helped by the fact that my general style of gardening tends to be plant it and then let it do its own thing! And I always lack confidence in which shoots need the pinching out. But as with lots of things in life, gardening related or not, once you start doing something you find you can figure it out better than maybe you'd anticipated, it's just a matter of diving in and giving it a go. Perhaps that would be the advice of a baby penguin?! And hopefully I'll be more likely to get a better crop of tomatoes now.

Sally.