Fuchsia Fantasy 3

I felt like doing some quilting on my little Husqvarna so decided to finish up this little quilt top that I made a few years ago. The flower was inspired by a class with Jane Sassaman, where we had to choose a photo of a flower, do a pencil sketch, erase most of the detail and exaggerate what was left. I really like the fat little fuchsia flower that I ended up with!

When I quilt on my domestic machine, I like to use squares of non-slip drawer liner instead of quilting gloves. I find the gloves make my hands too hot, and I'm forever taking them off and putting them back when I want  to thread needles, grab a mouthful of my cup of tea or whatever. I also put a square of it under my foot pedal to stop it sliding on the tile floor.

fuchsia fantasy

At the end of February I went to the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne and did a class with Jane Sassaman. I LOVED the class! I won't go into details about the class - you'll just have to buy her book called 'The Quilted Garden', which has just been reprinted. I took lots of photos of fuchsias with me and designed this quilt using the photos for inspiration. The whole process was so much fun, and I have drawn up a few more designs using the same flowers. I could make a series of fuchsia quilts without even thinking about moving on to any other flowers!

So I loaded the photos backwards. There's a couple of views of the back of the quilt showing the free motion quilting, then a couple of closeups of the front, then a full view of the front. I couldn't get the colour right in the full view - the first closeup is closest to the actual colour. All the fabrics for the flowers and leaves is my own hand dyed cotton, and the blue background is one of the Moda Marbles range.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.