Zinnias — Finished!

Even though this is the third quilt I’ve finished this quarter, it’s only the first one that was on my original Q2 Finish-Along list…

I made this background probably in 2007 because I wondered if the idea would work. It did, but it was a pain — the entire background is constructed with partial seams, which is tedious. And then the light green zigzag was so powerful that it was too strong to be used as a background.

And then I decided to make some monster flowers and see how they’d do on the background.

I made the flowers to see what would happen if I made a Dresden with too many wedges. Each of these flowers has around 32 wedges per layer, as opposed to the usual 20 wedges. So they are forced out of two dimensions, which is what I needed to do for the 2014 Heritage Quilters of Huntsville challenge.

Once I made all of the wedges, I had to figure out how to get the extra wedges to distribute evenly, and I called on an old skill to do it — SMOCKING!

I used the standard scaffolding Stem Stitch to get the petals to fan evenly around the centers, and it worked beautifully!

Once they were on the background it looked even better than I had anticipated.

I covered the centers of each double-layered flower with an upside-down yo-yo and appliqued those down. Each flower is attached to the background at every Dresden seam for the bottom layer, so usually around unique attachment points. I tied off each attachment point separately so that the flowers will be more secure. The top layer is attached at every other seam, so that they’d have a little more fluidity. Leaves are a little less secured but because they don’t have as many pieces and aren’t as heavy, I decided that was OK.

The leaves were painted with white Paintstiks so that they’d show up a bit more. If I had it to do over I’d probably do the leaves in citron or something that would show up better on the background, but I was also trying to make this entirely from fabrics already in my possession and I didn’t have anything that would work for that.

The challenge show was June 19, and my quilt ended up getting one of the top three prizes! I won “Best Use of 3D Elements” as voted by the viewers, which pleases me greatly!

(thanks to Vickey H. for the above photo)

I’m pleased with how it turned out, and it has already sold to my friend Jill. It’s like I made it for her master bedroom. I’ll ship it to her this week and can’t wait to see pictures of it in place.