“Nice Cup o’ Tea’ by Jen

Here's my entry for Project QUILTING challenge 2.   I call it "Nice cup o' tea" because when the challenge was announced, I was disappointed and thought about not participating because the block was really not my cup of tea.   

So, I started to do some research about the plant.  I learned that they grow in shade or part shade in the forests of the South and Eastern United States.   I pondered doing a landscape quilt, but thought that this was a great excuse to try an applique technique just focusing on the blooms.   

So, looking at the traditional block, the bloom was 4 diamonds and a triangle.   I added some fusible web to the back of a number of my hand-dyed fabrics and ran them through my Accuquilt GO on the 2.5 inch strip cutter, then turned them and sent them through again to get the diamonds.  I laid them out and determined how big the triangles needed to be and cut those out.  

I was limited by the green hand-dyed fabric - out of the fat quarter that I had I was only able to get 20 triangles, so that was how many flowers I put on the quilt.  I auditioned different layouts and enjoyed the motion of this spiral. 

I fused them into place and then used a 2.5 mm blanket stitch with yellow thread around all 100 of the applique pieces.  It got to 10 pm on Sunday and I was just over half-way through them, but I decided to take a break to sleep.    Here's a photo of my cat Richard Parker inspecting the applique from the back of the top on Tuesday Morning.

I used just over one large spool of Aurifil 2892 Pine to stipple the background around the blocks, ghosting in one block in each corner of the quilt the quilting took about 5 hours.    Following this, I used the scraps of the 108" Kona Cotton Black fabric that was the top of the quilt to bind with small accents of the yellow and orange hand-dyed fabric to set off the binding.   It finished at 88" x 90."   I created it in Madison, WI  USA.

--Jen

~~~