Grandmother's Flower Garden

 

It's finally finished! My great-grandma (dad's mom's mother) started this quilt many, many, many years ago. When she died it went to my grandparents' house, and when my grandma died (even though my grandpa does some quilting), it got passed to me. Most of the flowers themselves were completed, with two or three that were missing the outer row or just one hexie. I think I was in late high school. I thought it was really ugly, and my quilting skills were still just beginning (I preferred straight seams in the machine) and I wasn't really sure how to hand-piece hexagons.

A few years later I decided to give it a try - I didn't want to invest too much extra time, so instead of doing the classic join with a border between the flowers, I just began stitching the flowers together directly. By hand. (Because I still don't know a better way to join hexagons!)

But I didn't like how it looked, and after getting it about 80% of the way done, set it back aside again. And had ten children.

But THEN, Covid hit! And with it, stay-at-home orders, and with the new routines that provided for our family (our favorite was Andrew Peterson reading aloud his Wingfeather saga a few chapters a night), I got it back out again and decided to cut green hexies for the border between the flowers, UN-did all of the joining I'd done, and then re-joined all of the pieces by hand little by little by little. To finish it around the edges I decided to make new half-flowers, which were created from my own collection of scraps.

I chose a pink flannel for the backing, and the binding is a scrappy binding using three different greens.

I machine quilted the layers using free-motion quilting. The flowers were done in four different styles (shown below) and the green borders I did a meandering vine with a leaf in each hexagon.

This iteration of the flower quilting breaks the center into sixths and follows the hexagonal shape of the "petals" for a honeycomb appearance.

This version swirls in the center and does two rows of curved concentric petals, kind of like a zinnia.

This iteration was a "rose" in my imagination, with wavy lines creating a swirl that starts in the center and works to the outer layer.

And the last version was a daisy form, with a single row of long, skinny petals radiating from the center.