Little Bouquet Quilt-a-long

As I mentioned last time, Cherri of Cherry House Quilts is currently hosting a quilt-a-long to make a 'little bouquet quilt' that I have decided to join in with.

I already showed you the fabrics I'd picked from my feeble stash out as possibilities for it, and at sewing club on Thursday evening we had a bit of a 'swap shop' where we brought along fabric/patterns we weren't likely to use to hopefully find them a new home where they'd be more loved. Jo brought along a whole heap of fabric one of her friends was going to be chucking out, so we has great fun picking through it finding pieces that would be true gems for each of us. I came home with quite a bit of fabric (whoops!), including some great pieces to use for this quilt-a-long project. I also picked up some other great fabric but I'll save posting about it for another time.

These are the fabrics I've chosen for the background of my quilt. I've gone for mostly greens and turquoises (because that's the colours I had!)

These are the fabrics I'm going to use for my flowers, I'm planning on making my bouquet with reds, pinks and a few purples. Again, because I have those colours, but they should contrast really well against the background. The last fabric on the right is a possible to use for the leaves, although I'm also considering cutting out leaves from the fabric from my leafy skirt to use... I'll see what each option looks like when I get to that stage.

Deviating from the instructions straight from the word go... as I don't have any "non fusible/non woven interfacing" I decided to use some white cotton that I had left from a previous project. In another deviation from the instructions I cut 5" squares of this white, aiming to end with 4" blocks for the background. Cutting out my strips, completely randomly at widths between 1" and 2.5", and once I had a reasonable number of each of my chosen fabrics cut I started stitching!

I've finished my background, which you can see in full here. It's not as nice as some of the ones I've seen photos of in the pool, having such contrasts within each block may have been a mistake, but I wasn't sure how else to do it with the number of different fabrics that I had. I'm optimistic though, as the red/pink flowers I have planned should still stand out really well. I cut out the perfect number of strips, only having one strip left over when I finished my last block.

The instructions for the flowers are due to be posted on the weekend, so this project will but put aside for a little while until then... maybe I'll finally stitch up my new PJs in the meantime...