Sew&Tell Friday - Not Your Grandmother's Flower Garden

Hi, all!!

Well, I've managed to make it through my second (and final) week of Lilli's fall break - she goes back to preschool next week and I get my Tuesdays and Thursdays back for sewing!   That's not to say we haven't had a good time while she's been out of school - today we went to see the Nashville Ballet perform a little ballet for our local library, and Miss Lilli had a ball trying to be a ballerina while she was watching!  I haven't had that much fun at the ballet in years!

Here's my first "sew and tell" for Friday:

Deborah with her very first quilt!

This quilt is my friend Deborah's first quilt - can you tell how proud she is?  I feel like a proud quilt-mama myself!  She did a beautiful job, even adding some flourishes in her border quilting on her own!   She's already planning to start on a sudoku quilt next.  I love seeing the next generation of quilters develop!!

I hope you like the quilt I'm about to share with you - I certainly do!  This quilt was W-A-Y out of my comfort zone - lots of new techniques, fabric, and designing on my own.  It has been given to a young woman in my Bible study group who had to have some very serious surgery yesterday.  She is such a unique personality that she really needed something quirky and whimsical.  I was looking on blogs and Flickr for some inspiration and saw this quilt.  Somehow it just struck me as being "right", and I started doodling on my own to see what I could come up with that had the same kind of feel.

I pulled a group of fabrics that were very saturated fall colors, as those seemed to be my recipient's preferred palette.    I also found a beautiful piece of Irish linen that came from my grandmother's stash.  It was 72 inches wide - perfect for this quilt!  This became the backing for the appliques.  I spread it out on my bed (out of the reach of helpful dogs) and my little assistant and I arranged the flowers and stems on the linen.  Here's a picture of where we started....

I did a little slimming of the stems, plus made them curvier to give it a little more whimsy!  (And I want to give a shout-out to my friend Karrie of Freckled Whimsy, who gave me a lot of encouragement and creative criticism on this quilt!   Be sure to check out her new tutorial for a quick string quilt - it's AWESOME!)  So here's the final version of - - - - - Not Your Grandmother's Flower Garden!

Look who's playing peek-a-boo!

This quilting was a bear (big and heavy quilt)
but totally worth it!

I can really knock these swirls out now!

The back of the quilt has
appliqued squares with Scripture verses
from friends of the recipient

This may be the biggest size quilt I can free-motion quilt on my Singer - it's about 70 inches square.  I'm not sure I could go any bigger!  But it was so much fun to try out a lot of different designs on this quilt.  And I'm beginning to feel like I may be able to design my own quilts someday.  So I'm really glad I had the chance to stretch my wings with this one!

By the way, there's another AccuQuilt GO! Cutter giveaway going on, over at Alderwood Quilts.  Go check it out!!  And don't forget the Friday giveaway on AccuQuilt's Facebook page....

I'm headed to a quilt show tomorrow afternoon - I hope to get lots of inspiration there, plus maybe meet some new quilting friends!  And maybe I'll get some pictures to share.......

I'll be linking up with Amy's Sew & Tell Friday - be sure to go check out what everyone's done this week and share some bloggy love!

Later!

Sarah

PS - You can find the winners of my Fall Into Fall Quilt Bloggers Giveaway here!