Tropical flower applique quilt

Welcome to my studio - 

I spent most of this past summer making an applique quilt for a dear friend. I admit I was positively obsessed with working on it and finished it in four months (queen size hand appliqued and hand quilted).  She loves tropical flowers and has one of my orchid paintings

so I went with that idea - I found some great applique patterns in the book Color-Blend Applique by Jane Townswick.  I enlarged the patterns and tweaked them - some a little and some a lot.  I hand appliqued the fabrics and used my technique for hand dyeing ribbon to add dimension to the orchid block. Her room is done is grays so I was able to find several shades that worked well together.  I had to be very careful piecing both the front and back as I began to run very low on the grays, pink, and lavender, and knew I could not find more locally.  I hand quilted the applique blocks enhancing the design and then used straight lines with 90 degree angles to define the blocks and to coordinate the borders.

I was very pleased with this quilt and am enthused to go back and finish a Baltimore Album quilt that I started 15-20 years ago.  When I lived in Jacksonville, I purchased a couple of  Elly Sienkiwicz's books and also purchased enough backing fabric to make a quilt. I have made about 12 blocks over the years (they still need finishing touches) and have plans for more SO I think 2014 will be the year to finish it - I should have almost all the supplies: backing, reds, greens, hand dyed solids so it's just down to finalizing the final block patterns and getting going - stay tuned for further updates!

thanks for reading and have a great day,

Chris