Flower Pot Tumbler Quilt

It’s been a while since I’ve had a quilt in a magazine so I’m delighted to share the Flower Pot Tumbler quilt as featured in the new issue (91) of Today’s Quilter.

This issue also includes a supplement with four absolutely stunning star quilts designed by Lynne Goldsworthy!

I have been hoarding a stash of large patterned fabric for years. Mainly favourite designs by Anne Maria Horner, Jennifer Paganelli, Kaffe Fassett and the like. These fabrics are so beautiful to look at but not necessarily easy to use in a quilt.  Last year I made this simple square cushion as my stop on a book hop for Sarah Ashford’s beginner quilting book and I realised it was time to start using this precious fabric!

I’ve always loved the tumbler quilt design and I thought this would work well for a low contrast quilt and a good sized tumbler would give plenty of space for the large patterns to shine.

But it was a bit too simple for Today’s Quilter readers so I wracked my brains to think of a way to incorporate some needle turn applique and realised that the tumblers also looked like flower pots and so the idea for the quilt was born.

These simple flowers in coordinating solids on a low-volume background break up the richness of all those colourful prints.

I made sure that a darker print was always below the flower to accentuate the flower pot effect.

The fabrics were such a delight to work with and make the finished quilt endlessly pleasing to look at.

The quilt is very hard to photograph successfully though as it is so busy!

I quilted it on my Handi Quilter Moxie long-arm using trailing leaves that started at one side of the quilt, went to the centre and then back again. I then repeated this from the other side of the quilt. This avoided lots of ‘threading-in’ at the end and meant I could manage uninterrupted ‘tendrils’.

I left the flowers free from machine quilting and added some hand quilted outlines using Aurifil 12wt cotton once the machine quilting was complete.

I even used the exact same binding as that initial inspiration cushion, the black and white stripe from Sarah Ashford’s GBQ Back to Basics collection for Dashwood Studio. I put aside a number of yards of this fabric when we stocked it in my old shop as I knew how useful it was going to be for binding over the years to come.

The tumbler part of this quilt is very quick and easy to do and then the flower applique offers some quality hand stitching time to slow you down a bit.

I’m betting that a lot of you have a big stash of large colourful prints that you have never been able to use and I hope this design will encourage you to get using that fabric. After all it’s not doing anyone any good folded up and stored!