Fabric, at last!

After all the drafting, it is such a relief to be able to play with fabric. First I got out all my pinks & creams and arranged them somewhat in value order. Next I gathered a lot of spring greens for the new leaves. Hellebores tend to carry their old leaves through the winter and these are a dull dark blue green. I generally cut them off as the new stems emerge. The new leaves come in yellow/ green hues.

Then I s

tarted to think about background. In this case my photos were not much help because most of the hellebores were pictured against new mulch - very boring. Even though the flowers and leaves are the real focus of these nature-inspired quilts, I find that it makes them much more interesting and natural seeming if multiple fabrics are used in the background, not just one - though I do have one quilt in the show where I made a different decision.

I pulled out boxes of fabrics and tried a lot of different colors with the pinks, creams and spring greens. Eventually, I had maybe a dozen that I felt worked with each other and set off the flowers and leaves.

I started with the square in the middle of the middle row - this flower would be the lightest in the quilt and would set one end of the flower color spectrum. Section by section I cut out the templates, applied them to fabric and pinned them onto the master drawing on the design wall. I started with the flower petals and kept stepping back to see how it looked - and made several adjustments if a fabric didn't work the way I had thought.

All the pieces were "fussy cut" picking the part of a fabric that had the tone and any markings to read as foreground or background petals. I used the original drawings overlaid on the photos as references, usually pinning them up on the wall and I often went back to the computer to get more detail and a better color sense.

The picture was taken after I had pinned up fabrics for the whole of the middle row. The top row shows part of the numbered drawing that I am pinning to. The two leaves are not piecing diagrams - I used a single leaf pattern for all three leaves.This can be seen on the bottom row where the freezer paper templates are pinned shiny side up - hence you can't see the numbers or tick marks.