Sunflower Quilt

Having just come off a one year tour doing Block of the Month for my guild, my co-chair and I had a dozen leftover unsold kits for a sunflower block for April. Twelve were was a few too many to add as giveaways to the winners, so I bought them myself to "quickly whip up" into a bright wall hanging.

Each block consists of a modified nine-patch block made from a central snowball block surrounded by four truncated QSTs and four corner squares. The original block pattern came from the Quilting Daily website and called sunrise star. Here is a summary of the basic construction steps from a sample practice block I made. First I made a central snowball block in brown and orange for the sunflower center.

Next I made four QSTs from the green background color, the orange of the inner sunflower petals, and the yellow of the outer petals.

Then I offset cut the four QSTs and assembled them about the central snowball, filling in the corners with four background squares. I saved the truncated edges of the QSTs to make a border later.

The kits for the monthly BOM were made up with stronger, more vibrant colors instead of the more subdues one of the sample. Once I pieced the 12 kits, I planned to assemble them in a 3 x 4 arrangement.

To add a bit of visual relief between the main body and the border, I added some striped fabric inserts. By varying the width of the inserts on the sides from those on the top/bottom I was able to make the corners come out "right", meaning I forced the border to be symmetric rounding the corners.

Since I wanted to keep the FMQ simple without fastidious ruler work, I used my favorite square-fill from the Shape by Shape free motion quilting book by Angela Walters (square #7) in the teal/green spaces with a King Tut 40 wt 3-ply variegated Fahl Green (an Egyptian clover) and then stitched free-form arcs around the four sided yellow "petals" of the sunflower with 3-ply 40 wt Essential cotton thread in Marigold #21171.

Hmmm... what to do in the brown centers of the sunflowers? I used my Coats & Clark Star 100% cotton thread in a matching brown. Ideally I wanted the bumpy texture of pebbles but I am not very skilled at that FMQ pattern. That meant I needed the practice. So I did one center in pebbles and decided it was too much work and did not show up very much anyway. I did the second center with a spiral pattern and a third center with a wavy grid. I decided I would do different centers in the sunflowers, four of each pattern. I did six sunflower centers one evening. They turned out fine (even if the dark brown thread barely showed up) and I returned to do the following six the next day.

The tension gremlins or lint goblins invaded my Sweet Sixteen overnight, or else the desire for perfection bug infected me. When stitching the remaining six sunflower centers, I saw some tiny dots of the pale thread peaking up to the front surface from the back and tweaked my tension, just a bit to eliminate them. Big Whoops! Four of my sunflower centers wound up with a huge mess on the back with lines of loopy brown thread snarls. So dismayed, I did not think to take a photo before I sheared off the bulk of the brown loopy "fur"; these photos show my progress as I snipped and picked at the pebbles, spiral, and wavy grid, in that photo order, to remove the remaining brown top thread remnants. My counter top was covered with those brown thread "hair" clippings much like the floor of a barber shop. The dark fuzz reminded me of my Wooly Willy magnetic hair toy from when I was a kid. Even more discouraging was the fact that I would need to FMQ that spiral and wavy line grid once again. I am considering leaving in that two pebbles ones on the back. They do not look so bad, perhaps... just like a scattering of poppy seeds. Oh, wait this is a sunflower, not a poppy. Eh, close enough.

I have lost my initial fear of free-motion quilting because I have learned from experience that most any errors can be plucked out. That does not imply however, that it is not painstaking to do so. After shearing off those brown thread loops, it took me longer to remove their remains with curved-blade snips and tweezers than it did to FMQ 12 brown centers, 96 yellow petals, and the green background, combined.  So much for "quickly whip up".  I am reminded of the saying "Man plans and God laughs". In honor of my Wooly Willy adventure, I considered naming this quilt SUNFLOWER SAM where SAM is an acronym for Such A Mess. It has a nice alliterate sound to it, like Sunbonnet Sue, and the name source could be my secret – except to those of you who read this post. Do I really need such a reminder though? Nah. I chickened out and named this quilt simply SUNFLOWERS.

I stitched scallops in the orange border and stitched parallel white lines piano-border-style in the striped inserted bands. I did use a scalloped ruler and a straight ruler for those border details. 

With my domestic Pfaff, I embroidered the labels on of grosgrain ribbon and then bound SUNFLOWERS in orange fabric that matched the outer peaked border.

The consistent thread color on the back of the quilt is a putty-colored, blah color called Stone that my Block of the Month co-chair gave me as a gift. She told me it blends in with everything. She was so right! It is 50 wt 2-ply Aurifil 100% cotton and it flowed like a dream in my bobbin thread. Thanks Liz! You have expanded my repertoire of favored threads. The two round shadowy regions are where my tension drifted on the pebbles.  I suspect the brownish area can be detected in the galloping horse test; i.e., if you can’t see the mistake when riding by on a horse at full gallop, then do not attempt to fix the "error".  I think those areas would be visible – I did not actually test from a galloping horse – but still I chose not to re-do those them, warning myself not to let perfect be the enemy of good. 

SUNFLOWERS finished 38½" wide by 53½" tall and the back is not visible unless you turn it over to look. This quilt was never intended as a county fair entry, anyway. It still makes me think of a field of cheery sunflowers and those brown spots are pockets of earth peeking through.