There is a Season - Spring: "Trillium"

This year, the "new from old" challenges Dorry is issuing have a new theme, the four seasons.  I posted a photo of the starting block back at the beginning of Spring - it looked like this -

Since I am not especially fond of boats, I used the block as a source of fabric. You will notice that my long-ago collaborator had no special respect for grain. The background fabric really shows this well.  This is why her block is not square and there are serious issues with the points of the triangles.  I took her hand-sewn block completely apart and starched the pieces thoroughly, over and over, until they were as stiff as paper.  See how they can stand up and hold each other up.

 

I've read that starch can only do so much to help with grain problems, and I certainly found that to be true. The boat fabric was a feedsack, and the background pale pink was also a very loose weave, and neither one stayed straight as I pieced the background of my little 24 x 24 inch quilt. I had a lot of difficulty with the points matching up. But no matter, I had more plans for this piece.

When I wrote about this challenge in April, I was pondering my color scheme. All the quilts in this series will incorporate green. I studied a lot of images on Design Seeds and came up with a sort of hybrid of several of the spring-flower inspired palettes that combined green and a pink somewhat  close to that of the boat block.

I think all my previous quilts for these challenges (except elements of the Dresden Plate), were pieced, so, with the Design Seeds photos' fresh in mind, felt it was time to do some more applique.

I wanted to design my own flower, and settled on the simplicity of the trillium, which is a native in the woods here. The smaller pink flower with the green center is straight out of the Electric Quilt library and serves as filler in my leaf wreath.  The bunny also comes from Electric quilt. Including a bunny was highly influenced by our Challenge Master herself, as she had chosen Easter as the theme of her most recent Round Robin quilt, and started us off with some very cute bunnies on a pastel block.

We are supposed to use 100% of the starting block on the front of the quilt if possible.  I designed the background to use the the fabric from the boat hull, visible in the larger pink piece top right. I then sewed the sail pieces together to make the piece I used on the bottom left so it would not be covered by the applique.  After that, I took the background pale pink and cut it for the small corner triangles in the blocks but had some leftover pieces.  I placed them on a too-bright pink fabric and held them in place with sheer iron-on interfacing, which you can see in the lower part of the larger piece in the corner block.

But I still had some little slivers of fabric I trimmed off when I got done cutting out the pieces for the face - so I used them in an extra block on the back of the quilt.

The backing fabric is a small part of a very large piece that Sherrye gave me for Dana's green and yellow Grandmother's Choice quilt. I'm trying not to buy fabric for any of these New from Old challenges, and that fabric seemed like a perfect late spring choice.

The bunny's eye was fun - they always tell you not to make the eyes just black - they need a catch light. I would have used a dot of white fabric paint, but a circle cut from the batik we used in  Judi's Healing Cloak served my purposes even better.

My quilting was pretty simple with a lot of parallel straight lines. I really love the effect it has combined with the triangles printed on the teal fabric just behind the bunny's nose.