Rhodie Blooms Flimsy

Rhodie Blooms, my variation on Bonnie Hunter's 2021 mystery quilt Rhododendron Trail, is a finished top! It's quite large, about 87" square at the moment. 

I'm super happy with how it turned out. And I have so much appreciation for Bonnie, who creates this space for all of us to play in every year. ❤

Most of the choices i made in the border were to try and tone down and balance the center, which is very bright and high energy. There are a lot of UV dyes in my fabrics, the white on white constant is quite reflective, and the aqua seems to highlight the pinks. So it is a lot. 😂

Since the flying geese for the border were already made i decided, eventually, to use them. But I also felt the quilt had reached its Maximum Pink Capacity, so I went shopping for the light purple fabric in the inner border. It was my first time in a quilt shop since Covid started! It was really nice to see everything with my own eyes and to talk to other quilters about fabric, lol. I didn't realize how much I missed it.

I thought a fairly dark border was needed to help ground the quilt. I used the remainder of the emerald fabrics from the hourglasses, and pieced them with some turquoise from my stash. The lime strip is also pieced from the leftovers from the center. I think the border did its job, it doesn't feel like the quilt will fly away any more!

So I'm happy to have that all done, and in only five months too! Feels like progress. Happy quilting everyone! 

Growing

Now that half my Rhodie Blooms blocks are sewn I've laid them out with the planned sashing to see how it will all look. I'm happy! Tilt your head because it will be sewn together on point. 😁

If you're familiar with Bonnie Hunter's Rhododendron Trail you can see her block right in the center there. I was playing with that, tried the hourglasses as sashing, saw the star shape, and decided to make that the middle of the block instead. 

I've used a different pink for the outside ring in each block. 

And a few purple fabrics too. I'm glad I added the purple, it helps to ground the quilt. 

I also auditioned a few different fabrics for that pink square in the center of the limes. The almost solid batik in the pictures above feels a little heavy. I was going to go all scrappy for those, but I quite like this floral:

It has all the same colors as the quilt! If I have enough I'm tempted to use it for all the squares. 

Anyway that's half so back to the sewing table! Happy quilting! ❤

First Rhodie Block

Here's the first block of my variation on Bonnie Hunter's Rhododendron Trail mystery quilt! Making circles out of squares and triangles just never seems to get old for me. 😁 I've decided to call it Rhodie Blooms, since it's more flowerlike than the original, and rhododendron is such a mouthful. 

My quilt will be square with 25 blocks. The remaining 24 are set up and ready to sew.

This should keep me busy for a while! I'm interested to see how the purple will fit in the block, so I'll do a few of those next.

Apparently Blogger has been bouncing or delaying the posting of some comments, so if it happened to you I apologize! But the settings are right so it's definitely Blogger doing it, not me. Thank you for reading in any case!

Happy quilting! ❤