Blooming Flower Garden

This is the view from the back deck, it's a natural pond with all kinds of waterfowl, fish and amphibians, unfortunately it's also a haven for water moccasins that mostly stay in the water! Care must be taken to keep the grass short to discourage the snakes from leaving the area and domestic animals are watched closely.

My friend's husband makes a mean mango daiquiri and that's what we had with our yummy lamb shanks, a lovely evening to a successful day.L

Project #3 was our focus today, starting with the strips for the background of the quilt, that was the most time consuming part. Tina Curran's pattern is our guide for this adventure, and it's interesting to see how Leslie and I approach the construction and how different our final quilts will be.

We began by laying the strips down on the design wall until we found an approximation of the basis. We began to piece the strips using a mitered seam rather than the block approach in the original pattern. This doesn't look at all encouraging but it's early in the process!l

I found the simplest way for me to join the strips together was to lay a ruler on the strip to be sewn and draw a line with a marker where I wanted to stitch.

Then I took the backing to the machine and pinned the new strip on the marked line, leaving the other strips still on the wall.

I sewed each consecutive strip in the same way until I had my backing the desired size.

Then squared it and trimmed to this, about 27"x29".

We cut out a wide selection of flowers from lifelike to stylized and modern, and ironed on a fusible backing, we prefer Steam a Seam Light 2, it is the most user friendly we have found.

This is my interpretation of the pattern mostly ready to do the final fixing of the appliqués, it needs just a couple more flowers and a little tweaking. One of the advantages of the Steam A Seam is that it has a sticky backing that adheres temporarily to the fabric but is repositinable until you reach the final design choice and can press the appliqués on permanently.

Below is Leslie's design, quite a bit different to mine as her eyes interpreted the picture.

She has yet to add her stems and some leaves, I love it she even has a little green frog hiding in the bottom of the picture! I think I must make a second quilt with different colors, as Leslie said they are addictive!

After church in the morning we will finish up with this quilt and see how far we get with the next project before I head for home Monday afternoon.