A Field of Flowers on a Cold Day

It's another cold day in Minnesota. It was -17 °F with a windchill of -40 this morning and it's been blowing like crazy so that major roads were closed and just about every school. My kids weren't supposed to have school today anyway because it is a teacher work day. So we slept in and are having a nice, lazy day. The kids and I are downstairs listening to classical music on iTunes Radio. Owen is working from home and though he doesn't get a lazy day but did get to sleep in a bit and avoided an hour long commute on crappy roads.

I've been doing some organizing in my office but have switched gears now because Owen needed my quiet office for a conference call. Perhaps inspired by the cold weather, I'm working on creating a field of flowers right here in my kitchen. No, I'm not creating a real field of flowers (who knows? it may be June before we see flowers in Minnesota!), I'm working on creating a field of flowers quilt.
Field of Flowers in progress
I made one of these Field of Flowers quilts before and it hangs in my home's entryway. The quilt that I'm working on today will be in a totally different color palette and will likely hang in my office. Like my first, this quilt is all in batiks. My background fabrics are a variety of browns and my flower fabrics will be in turquoise and purple and  I plan to toss in some black and pink and, well, we'll see what looks best when I get to that part. This is a quilt that has to sort of tell you what works when you start laying out the flower petals.

My first Field of Flowers quilt hangs in my entryway.
The fun part of this quilt is that each one is totally different. I've seen about 40 of these quilts in person or in pictures and no matter what fabrics people choose, they turn out great.

Making one is really quite easy. The background is a bunch of squares of fabric sewn together. Simple. All straight sewing and though there are seems to match up, no one will notice if they don't because they will be looking at all of the great flowers. The flowers are simply cut out of fabric and fused onto the quilt. Then, the quilt needs to be quilted to hold the flowers in place. My friend, Anne Tuma of Down Under Quilting in New Prague did the quilting for me on my first field of flowers and will do this new one as well. The machine quilting that Anne does to finish off these field of flowers quilts is really fabulous. I'm excited to see what she does with the quilt I'm working on right now. My goal is to get this quilt done this week as Anne wants to borrow it and my first field of flowers for a presentation she is giving on color in quilts.

Better get back to work on my field of flowers!
Close-up look at Anne's machine quilting.
Anne offers quilting classes and I think she may be offering the Field of Flowers quilt class again this summer - be sure to check out her Classes page on her website if you are interested.

You can also see some examples of this quilt in other colors if you click HERE
Anne has also pictures of several Field of Flowers quilts (and many other quilts) on her Down Under Quilting Facebook page.

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