Glorious Blossoms II: Construction of the Center Panel
Below is the current layout of the center panel – the panel that will have the fabric folded flowers on them.
In this next picture I placed the printed fabric next to the panel layout so that you can see the fabric that I used to determine the colors I chose to make the blossoms.
Keep in mind that in the layout, the blossoms aren’t open yet. They are still folded closed. Opening them will be the last thing I do because it is easier to work with the rest of the quilt while the flowers are folded closed. When they are open, they will look like this
People ask me how I decided what order to put the flowers in the panel. I just put all 131 flowers in a big bag and mix them around
Then as I layout the center panel, alternating flower squares with background squares, I pull out a flower square and put it in the panel when required. I work from thet top left of the panel to the bottom right. When I am finished, I step back to see if there is too much of one color concentrated in parts of the panel. If so, I swap it out with another flower color in another part of the panel until the flowers look fairly evenly distributed.
Since I didn’t think I would be able to sew the panel right away, and I wanted to get it off of my floor, I numbered the rows and took a picture
Then within a row I stacked the fabric pieces in order from left to right with the first block of the row on top and the last block of the row on the bottom of the stack. Then I wrapped the stack in tissue paper and taped the number of the row outside the tissue paper wrapping. I did that with all 29 rows. That way, when I’m ready to sew, I know the order of the rows and the order of the blocks within the row. If I get stuck, I have the pictures to guide me.
This quilt is a modification of the quilt “Glorious Blossoms” designed by Rebecca Wat that appeared in her book “A Fresh Twist on Fabric Folding”.
