Today my husband and I needed to take my mother to the hospital to get a procedure done.  She lives an hour and a half away. My husband is the one who drives when we go out to visit, so I saw an opportunity for some English Paper Piecing in the car, and also while waiting at the hospital.

Even though I am currently in the planning stages for a project, I am not actually stitching anything at the moment, so I decided to do some spontaneous work with my big bowl of basted hexagons.

I grabbed a large handful of hexagons from the bowl, and put them in a plastic bag to take along with me. As we were driving to see mom I started to piece together some small flowers for a possible Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt.

I decided to use a violet batik for the center of the flower and include a couple solid hexagons along the outside.  Here’s the first flower I made:

After looking carefully at this first flower I decided that it might be good to have the two solids directly across from each other, so my next flower looked like this:

I went on to make another two flowers with the violet batik center for a total of four flowers:

I wasn’t sure how these flowers were going to look after they were assembled and was starting to think that maybe I should make my flowers with maroon centers and put nothing but patterned fabrics along the outside. I proceeded to make a flower with a maroon center to see how I liked it:

I liked the result, and went on to make three more such flowers for a total of four:

Then I started to think about how I might combine these flowers.  The ones with the violet batik centers might end up densely packed with hexagons of hunter green to tie them together.

The flowers with the maroon centers are crying out for a solid border to join them.  This could be hunter green as shown below, or perhaps a variety of low volume fabrics.

After playing around with these flowers a bit I found myself focusing on the orange, green, and brown batik which I had at one time called an ugly fabric.

Well, all by itself, as a large expanse of pattern, it is kind of ugly.  I used it on the back of the binding sample that I am currently putting through a three month torture test. I happen to have about a yard of it left and had no idea what I might eventually do with it.

I am seriously considering starring this fabric in a quilt along with oranges, greens, and browns. I do like my Kona solids.