Summer Garden Quilt

If you've been here before you'll know that our garden is one of my great pleasures. So it's no real surprise that it sometimes influences my quilts, too.

After someone remarked "you never use green in your quilts" and realising that the view outside my windows is actually mostly green (this is Ireland after all!), I decided to look for green fabrics in my boxes. Turns out I have a few!

As so often happens, the quilt changed a few times while making it. I started with a plan for a huge quilt, sewing strips of varying widths to a length of 80 inches or so. Going from darker to lighter green and back to dark. And I didn't quite like it... So the strips got cut in half, going from dark to light, and aiming for a smaller quilt.

I debated on orientation of the dark/light: Random? Alternately light one way and the other? I decided they needed to go in one direction, dark at the top, light at the bottom. A bit like the border from my kitchen window.

Then I realised that it needed something more to break up the green a little bit. Little scraps of purple and red were added here and there to represent the fuchsia flowers and foxgloves that are plentiful in the garden, too. And that the strips needed to go horizontal rather than vertical. So this is where it is at now, shown in its natural environment:

There is more to do, and I am already thinking of how to quilt it...

Sandra