Wild Flowers Applique Quilt

Nicole came to see me months ago to discuss quilting for her hand appliqued Wild Flowers quilt . . . she did a beautiful job of the applique!  The difference with this quilt was Nicole's choice of batting - she purchased wool batting from a woolen mill not far from here.  The batt was less processed than anything I have worked with - but hey - worth a try!  I asked Nicole to bring me a sample of the batting so I could quilt up a practice piece to see how it quilted up. 

OK . .. pretty poofy . . .
 

Nicole wanted "loft" with the quilting - so we talked about quilting designs and what the focus of the quilt should be.  Nicole of course wanted the flowers to be the focal point, but didn't want the flying geese to be lost in the quilting - after all, there is a lot of work in those flying geese!  She also wanted to maintain the loft of the batting, so we decided to use a less dense type filler design.  Here's a photo of the wool batting . . .

I had to McGyver a hammock to hold the batting as it tended to stretch and lose it's shape with any type of pulling - such as hanging from the bar - it worked!
 

Originally, I was going to outline each flower piece very close to the applique, then loosely fill the blocks with swirls right up to the flying geese pieces, but when I did that with the first block, I soon realized that to make those flying geese "pop" , I would need to stitch-in-the-ditch (SID) around each one.  So that's what I did - LOTS of SID!  It gave me an opportunity to try out different rulers that I have . . . and the winner for  doing that small size SID is  my Itty Bitty - it just seemed to have the right feel for this type of work.

Now, having said that, I also decided to SID around the inner border to make it lay better - and my choice of ruler for that type of work is the Mystical Mini from Quilter's Apothecary.  I particularly liked the way I could move it along the ditch as I went . . . maybe if I had the bigger version of this I would like it too, but I don't have that one - yet ;) -



 BTW - 288 Flying Geese; 80 squares = cramped hands!


and then there is the ruler work in the bead-board border - my choice there is Deloa Jones Castle - easy to maneuver, nice markings and just feels good in the hand.   . . . what I would give for Channel Locks (!)

 

 

So there you have it - three different rulers for three different uses - those are my choices for now anyway.

I also outlined each flower, leaf and berry in each of the squares and setting trianges . . .

Here is the finished product.  The photos don't really show it, but the flowers almost have a 3-D effect!  Nicole is going to do some hand stitching in the leaves of some of the blocks to give them a bit more definition.

 

 Nicole was very pleased with the end result . . . it is a beautiful quilt!  Thanks for looking!



Cheers - from the Little House . . .