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!

And Some Flowers

I've been thinking about some free-pieced coneflowers since the summer, but couldn't really justify starting something new then. When I realized all those word pairs I've been making belong in a border, there was a demand for something in the middle. I immediately thought of these. Thematically, they are kind of perfect. 😁

For the leaves I wanted to suggest a light, feathery texture without being too literal. I made green and white strata, sliced them up, and rotated through the layers as I sewed them together. It is a good way to generate a lot of piecing quickly. 

My plan was for the flower head to be about the same width as two leaf sections. As you can see, they are nowhere close. 😂 I think I'll build out the background around the flowers to make them fit better.

I also was planning to make chunky stems, about 3 cm/1"+, but now that i look at the picture i think a crisp skinny stem will sharpen it up quite a bit. I don't want anything to line up too rigidly, but there still has to be some definition to hold the eye. And to balance the high contrast border too.

That's the real fun of an improv approach, isn't it? Try, adjust, carry on. Enjoy the surprises along the way. ❤