Not My Grandmother's Flower Garden......2006

This will probably always be my own personal favorite quilt because it holds so many memories.

In 2006 the Raintree Quilt Guild announced a challenge with the theme "Nature's Masterpieces". That night my mind decided I wanted to do a crazy quilt with all the beautiful flower fabrics I had been collecting and to put a 3-D "garden ball" in the center of the garden. As usual, my creative mind is way beyond my skill level! I've always wanted to do a crazy quilt and this became a learning experience for me!Garden balls have a lot of fond memories for me.....both of my Grandmother's flower garden and of our peony bed in Indianapolis where I grew up. Grandma probably had a lot to do with my early love of flowers, so this quilt became dedicated to her.

I'll just put a lot of photos to try to show some of the details. I litereally worked with a book of crazy quilt stitches open next to me and tried whatever looked interesting. I learned a lot of things and made some mistakes, but that never stops me from loving a project when I'm done :-)


I was trying to photograph part of the border to show some of the stitching. All of these photos should be able to click and make them larger.

The cats are "store bought" patches, so please don't think I stitched them! I learned to make ribbon roses and tried some other ribbon flowers as well.

The pedestal for the ball was my own design and I stuffed it and then decided it was too fat. The pink roses on the pedestal are store bought, but the rest are all hand made. I love adding beads to stuff and stitched them all over this thing! The ball itself was hard to figure out and I intended to dab fabric paint reflections on it to make it look more real, but my experimenting with that didn't work out. So it doesn't shine like a real "gazing ball".

Where flower fabric meets the sky or border, I tried to extend the chopped off flowers with embroidery stitching and beads.

I decided to add these 3-D ferns and never really liked how it looked or the dark border in general.....too wide, I think now. Oh, well....more learning!

Every crazy quilt is suppose to have a spider's web for good luck. That was fun! I made the spider out of buttons. I added lace bits all over the thing. To me, crazy quilts are a mix and match of all sorts of things, so I just aimed for that :-)

The back of the quilt became like a second quilt! I decided to add pictures, even though no one but me would ever see them or know they were there! Sort of a waste, but I just wanted them there.

A flat version of the ball became the label dedicated to my Grandmother Herner.

I chose the name as a play on the title of a real quilt block called "Grandmother's Flower Garden" which looks NOTHING like this quilt :-) However, it made me think of MY grandmother and her flower garden.

Here is Grandma by her garden ball.

My sisters and I visting at Easter time posing with Grandma and the garden ball.

I'm the little one in the red dotted swiss dress :-)

Me with my first peony at home in Indianapolis.

My sisters with peonies next to our garden ball.
This quilt was a work of love for me and a lot of fun and hangs in my sewing room for me to enjoy. It's not a great quilt, but a speacial one in my heart.