The flying flower is well tethered to the tree trunk with chain stitches. Beware! It’s one of those climbing plants that you can take over the garden.
I’ve decorated the giant flower with a few French Knots around the edge and filled the lazy daisy stitches on the stem with that same Really Red thread. Oddly enough there is a tiny flower growing off the rooftop of the house. How did that get there?
Today it is 11 below Fahrenheit in my garden. But inside it is warm and cozy and I dream of summer and flowers.
The rooftop garden on my Whimsy Lane quilt hosts a variety of pinks or dianthus flowers (a genus of about 34 species in the family Caryophyllaceae). Not only are my pinks pink but the edges are cut with a pinking blade making them pinked pinks.
The skinny stems are decorated with straight stitches placed across each one. Don’t you love how the size 12 Peas in a Pod thread stripes add a little whimsy to the flower stems?
Flower petal shapes are stitched with a size 8 Lettuce thread. It takes 3 types of embroidery stitches to finish each pink petal: the stem stitch around the yellow dot, the back stitch around the petal edges, and the fly stitch for the pinked edges. Add an orange French knot to the center of each flower and call the pinks a distant cousin of the Caryophyllaceae family.
Your next quilt composition can begin with a simple design trigger like this bias-fused collage of light blue and purple fabric. It has so many possibilities! Creating artwork from design triggers is common practice if you are an improviser. I call this method of making art accidental design.
Being an accidental artist is the topic for my current online class with Quilter’s Affair. Students create design triggers after building several fused collages. Then they use their scraps and collages to develop compositions based on those design prompts. Here’s what became of my design trigger. In keeping with my quest for the perfect vase, I created this striped vase for skinny flowers placed on an orange doily.