Scraptastic Applique!

A few weeks ago we announced the workshops for our Thread House Retreat in January. The retreat sold out after just 6 days! Karen, Lynne and I are teaching two workshops each (the most popular of which can be repeated) and one of mine is needle-turn applique. So I thought it would be nice to make up a new design for the class. You can check out all the Thread House Retreat workshops here.

I am very into dark backgrounds at the moment and I wanted something with lots of flowers, so I decided that a big bowl of blooms would be nice. I have a lot of flower patterns already tested from the Seasonal Garland Cushion series I have been doing for Today’s Quilter and this was a nice opportunity to use them again.

I managed to use up lots of scraps for the leaves and flowers. Here are is a nice ‘in progress’ shot so you can see how you need to sew down all the petals before you attach the centres.

Using one of the motifs from the bowl fabric itself as inspiration (fabric is from Color Brigade by Jennifer Paganelli) I drew a flower pattern freehand and quilted it in red, adding a few French knots to finish.

Now I need to decide what to do with this. A cushion? A bag? Or the start of a new quilt, perhaps the centre of a medallion?