Garden Play

Growing up, I remember helping my mom with the gardens. She always started lots of flowers from seed and we had a huge veggie garden too... There is even photographic evidence of my love of flowers starting early with a photo of me with a little rose bud that I had popped off one of Mom's bushes in one hand, and a "bouquet" of weeds in the other when I was about 3, so of course flowers are the main part of my piece.

"Garden Play"- 10.5"x13.5"

I had been cutting a lot of flowers, leaves and butterflies from my large stash of Wonder Under backed fabrics using a new die cutter when the theme was announced for this challenge. I took some simple flower shapes and fused up a bunch of random compound flowers, which were perfect for this piece. I normally try to use flowers that are "botanically correct" (thanks to the degree in Horticulture), but since I was doing this as from a child's view of flower gardens, I just wanted to use lots of color and flowers that were a bit more child-like.



I began with a background of painted fabric with a border, and fused some roughly cut fabric for the grass and stems. Then I added lots of my fused flowers and leaves, and quilted everything using clear thread. A sparkly pink ladybug and a couple dragonflies were also added (reminds me of my mom telling of my presenting her with a wasp that I had caught at the age of 3....). I topped all that off with some single hole plastic button-like flowers. I also added pearl beads as centers to the plastic flowers and some of the fabric flowers.

Keeping with my child-like theme, I decided to glue the bugs and beads onto the quilt with a strong glue instead of stitching them on by hand... The photo to the left is a detail shot showing the abundance of flowers a bit closer.