Urban Daisy

Urban Daisy
89" x 91"

Back when I was testing fabrics (here), I made a lot of these big daisy blocks.  You may remember this quilt from a previous post?  They are approximately the size of a fat quarter.  All are dyed first.  Then I traced the design lightly with a pencil by using my sliding glass door in my studio as a light "table".  It is definitely harder to draw on a vertical surface, but with the sun shining through, it is really awesome!  ....and as an added bonus, it is free, came with the house!  :)

It was hard to decide how to quilt it.  The standard is to start in the center and work your way out.  Which would have been fine, but did not work too well with the design I had in mind.  I wanted to echo each flower, which means skipping space in between the flowers when you start echoing the next one.  The problem is that no matter how expertly you have basted your quilt, there is bound to be at least a little bunching of the fabric in between each quilted element.  Which is exactly what happened to me.  It is frustrating to be so far along in the project and run into technical difficulties.  At least for this one, I had anticipated it.  Not sure if that makes it any better.

 Solution??  The only way to ease in the extra fabric is with extra quilting.  So I decided to quilt these little circles.  They look like dots on the fabric because the the quilting is so dense.  Functionally, they worked perfectly to draw in the extra fabric.  And the dots have a subtle appearance.  The only problem I had was the number of them necessary over the entire almost king sized quilt.  Ugh!!  I used paper cut circles pinned in place to show the placement.  Then I unpinned the paper circle, and replaced with a round sticker.  I sewed with the sticker in place, then peeled it off and put it in a new location.  It can be reused about 12 times before I needed another one.  It is interesting to see how much the quilting has shrunk the quilt.  Before quilting it was 92" x 92".  That's a lot of quilting!