Blogger's Quilt Festival.....Spring 2010

Someone sent me the link to Amy's very nice quilt site and this blogger festival, so I decided to enter :-) I've written about this quilt before, but am doing it again to fit the rules. You can click on any photo to see it larger.I call this wall hanging, "Not My Grandmother's Flower Garden...." (Sorry about showing it on the floor, but I can't get a good photo where it normally hangs)

The name reflects that this is not a "traditional" quilt pattern. I love to make things up, as well as do traditional quilts. This quilt was for the Raintree Quilt Guild challenge in 2006 to make a quilt involving flowers and nature. My grandmother loved flowers and had an elaborate flower garden that helped inspire my love for flowers. My favorite thing in her garden was the "gazing ball" or "garden ball".....whichever you call it! We had one in our garden as well and I loved looking at them. I decided I wanted to do a "crazy quilt" with a garden ball in the center! It was loads of fun to work on and I learned a lot making it.

I made up how to do the garden ball and its pedestal....both stuffed. The cats on the quilt are iron-on decals and the roses on the pedestal are store bought, but the rest of the flowers are my own ribbon work and embroidery. I had fun learning to make different things and do different stitches to embellish this quilt.

I put lace and beads and all sorts of stitches all over this thing! It is rather heavy :-) I had fun completing the flowers with embroidery that overlapped the sky areas or the border.

I'm not sure I like the 3-D fern border that I did...too wide....but it was another learning experience. All crazy quilts need a spider web and spider, so this is mine. The spider is a couple of buttons and some beads.

Cat hiding in the ferns.....I love cats, so there had to be a couple somewhere in the garden.

Many people might like the back of the quilt better than the front and no one even sees it! I used photos of my grandmother and my sisters and me in her garden by the garden ball and also a couple from our peony garden at home with its garden ball.

This was a very personal quilt and a labor of love! I enjoyed doing it and dedicated it to my Grandmother's memory.

I made a lot of mistakes and would change things, but that is part of quilting......learning with each project.