Working on Project Quilting Challenge 3

The challenge this week is make a quilt inspired by the artwork of Annie Young - check out her blog!

I love the rich colors and the flowers :) I'm also inspired by the fact that she has words ~ poems, verses, thoughts ... with her artwork. SO my inspiration is found in the colors, flowers and words :)

Since the colors are so rich, I opened up my Batik cabinet (well, it is a BIG shelf in the cabinet) and pulled batiks that made me happy. Then I thought about flowers and decided I was most inspired by the coneflower (echinacea) which I planted last year in the only spot prepped for flowers (no pics, sorry). She does use coneflower in several of her paintings, so they must be very inspiring ;) 

At first I was going to use Ricky Tims' Caveman Quilting techniques as they are freeform enough for my vision, but then decided to go the route of snippet style applique.

I put some fusible web on the backs of the fabrics I chose for the petals and cut them up into petal shapes. NOTE: when using this technique remember to remove the paper backing BEFORE cutting all those little pieces!!!! Removing the paper backing from lots of those thin strips was NOT fun!

Then I started layering the petals on parchment paper as I don't want to commit them to my background fabric quite yet. I want to make sure the words work first!

I continued to layer the petals as I made them way too thin and the big centers really dwarfed the wimpy petals!

While I love the fabric I chose for the centers of the flowers, they were way too chunky and (in real life, not camera life) looked like black holes on my flowers. I had to come up with another solution.

Princess Sunshine suggested a halo effect around the centers as you kind of see that in echinacea flowers and I think she is right, so I ironed them down in the center of my flowers :)

I did use another layer of parchment paper over the petals and centers before I ironed them, just in case I had a petal turned the wrong way (I didn't, thankfullly) to avoid getting fusible on my iron. This is just a great suggestion any time you use fusible web - put parchment paper (or equivalent) over your pieces :)

Now to work on a saying for this little quilt!