Kim's Garden
Approximately 95" square
This quilt is so big that it was mostly impossible to get a full front photo but we did the best we could on a breezy day! It's named Kim's Garden because it's for one of my best friends, Kim. I knew when I started this quilt that it might be hers because it's a very "Kim" quilt.
This quilt started with an impulse purchase at least 15 years ago.
This quilt started with an impulse purchase at least 15 years ago.
I was at the Virginia Quilt Museum and saw a large, gold, beat up tin in the gift shop and it was FULL of these basted flowers and petals. I have no idea where these flower came from but, clearly, the woman didn't really like the quilting part of the process. I made up a story that I thought that this woman was having an affair with a man in the next town over and she worked on these as a cover activity while on the bus to the next town. No one would suspect a woman sewing of doing anything other than going to visit her family.
A few years after the purchase I spent a weekend washing all of the blocks and dividing them into piles for quilts. The first pile was a stack of flowers in all colors and each flower was a different fabric. With those I made the quilt top to the left. I worked on the applique for both of these quilts while watching TV and traveling. I finished this first quilt top in May 2018 and it's still waiting to be quilted.
In the assortment of blocks there were enough blue blocks to also make a quilt with each flower being a unique fabric. Kim's Garden is that quilt. There are plenty of petals and blocks for yet another quilt should I ever get motivated.
A few years after the purchase I spent a weekend washing all of the blocks and dividing them into piles for quilts. The first pile was a stack of flowers in all colors and each flower was a different fabric. With those I made the quilt top to the left. I worked on the applique for both of these quilts while watching TV and traveling. I finished this first quilt top in May 2018 and it's still waiting to be quilted.
In the assortment of blocks there were enough blue blocks to also make a quilt with each flower being a unique fabric. Kim's Garden is that quilt. There are plenty of petals and blocks for yet another quilt should I ever get motivated.
In this photo the quilt is spread over a queen size bed. It's huge, just the way that I like my own quilts. Because the first quilt had a white background I decided to go a different route and make this one with pale pink and yellow fabrics for the background. The blanket stitch applique is done in a dark blue.
I gravitate towards 2 styles of quilting: ruler work and filler work. I didn't want quilting this to be stressful so I stuck to my favorite quilting activities. I used a simple shallow curve ruler and a straight ruler. Nothing complicated. For this super wide border I decided on this element to bring the flower center circle out of the blocks. I used 2 filler motifs: one on the pink fabrics and one on the yellow fabrics.
The flowers are outlined and there's a little stitching in the petals and around the center. Hopefully after it's washed these will puff up a bit. I used Superior So Fine thread for the ruler work and Wonderfil Invisifil for the flowers and the filler stitching.
Every flower is a different fabric and I picked only 3 colors for the centers. I wasn't concerned about how the center colors dispersed throughout the quilt. I picked the best center color for each block and I like that little pop of brightness throughout.