Rhododendron Trail Fabric Pull

It's Quiltville mystery time again! This year's is named Rhododendron Trail. My improv coneflowers quilt is going great, but it's been a lot of thinking. I'm ready to let someone else tell me what to do. 😂 My last mystery, Good Fortune, is a finished flimsy, so I have room to start. And I don't think you can go wrong with a pink and white quilt inspired by flowers. Right up my alley! 

I've only made one significant change from Bonnie Hunter's colours. She used pink, burgundy and yellow. Burgundy is about my least favorite colour (still remember the horror of Marsala), so I've chosen a shadowy range from grey through deep purple instead. 

I'll use a range for the yellow also, from lemon through citron and lime. 

I found a fairly large white on white piece for the background. I'm hoping it will stretch for the whole project because I'm really bored with my collection of low volume whites. I've used them in SO many quilts now. But if necessary I can probably use a black on white low volume print as well. 

I have that very light sea glass print for the constant. I think i can get away with it because the white is also constant and reads as a solid.

I'm looking forward to getting started! 

Coneflower Layout

This is where I am right now. I can't fit it all in the photo, but you can see the full layout in my sketch:

Two posts ago I was thinking that I would keep the leaves wider than the flower heads, since I made the leaves Way Too Big. But I laid out the flowers before I even attached the leaves and it was clearly not going to look good.

So a lot of leaf trimming happened. 😁

I have a stack of those trimmings now. Maybe they'll find a place in the quilt, maybe they'll just be placemats because we could use some new ones. 😂

In the sketch you can kind of see my plan to log cabin around 3 sides of each flower. It's time to make them all the same size to save my sanity sewing them together. I haven't measured anything yet and I love that they're all different. 

I plan to log cabin around the words too when I am ready to sew those together. I'm hoping the consistent construction method will unify those very different pieces.

There's no photo yet, but I have laid out the words around the flowers and I'm pretty happy with it. So it's going well.

I've also looked at the colours for the new Quiltville mystery Rhododendron Trail. I have a good feeling about a pink and white design inspired by flowers! And it's been a couple years since my last one so I'm going try to do it. That gives me about 3 weeks to get to a good stopping place with this one. 

Fancier

Another idea i had for the coneflowers was to add a contrasting strip. At first I thought they should be in a separate quilt, but then I thought just do it now. 😂

I made the top one first and didn't love it, but the second one is better. I think I'll just rip that final seam on the top one, trim down the yellow part, and it will be much better. And then I'll make one more.

I forgot to share this earlier, but I did also make that "lost and found" word pair from the title of an earlier post. 😁

I've had several ideas for a transition between the light center and the dark border, but I have a feeling I should hold off before I sew anything until I get the center sewn together. It's possible that it's already enough. We'll see!