The latest edition of Quilting Arts magazine is now out and I am very pleased to have a small quilt that was accepted for the challenge 'In the Garden' included. 

For a change I thought I would share the process I went through whilst making this quilt. Here is my description of 'How to grow a quilt';

I often start my quilts in this way, making small studies or samples by experimenting with different scraps of fabric. For this quilt I started with the idea of using hexagons, taking my inspiration from traditional Grandmother's Garden quilts that use papers and the English paper piecing technique. 

I looked through my scrap basket and found a selection of small floral prints that might work, attached some fusible to the back and cut out a selection of small hexagons.

Starting with hexagons, I played about with the layout on different backgrounds. The yellow and purple were an obvious choice, but I wanted to try out other ideas to be sure.

To add more interest and make the eye move around the quilt I experimented with adding some thin strips of fabric behind the hexagons. I tried out different thicknesses, colours and positions.

Adding more interest to the background fabric I used a few lino cut stamps I had used for another project and hand stitched the strips down with some thick contrasting thread.
I also found an old book and carefully tore out garden type words and sprinkled them over the quilt.

Next the hexagons needed stitching down. I tried straight stitches and a curly free motion stitch, which I thought looked much nicer - so I continued with that. A bit of sparkly thread also filled in the centers of two flowers nicely. 

As it was starting to look quite full now I decided to add some of the quilting. I wanted both hand and machine quilting - so I started in the top left with some straight lines, quite close together, to compress the quilt in this area.

The quilt was filling out nicely, but the centres of the flowers were still a little empty. I wanted something more than just the sparkly thread I added earlier, so I thought of buttons.... but which colour???

Brown, blue, white, pink, orange...... I settled for red which I thought had more pop.

Lastly the remaining empty space needed to be hand quilted using  the same thick thread  as earlier.