Before I move on to the topic at hand for this week’s post I want to report on my progress on the latest Batik Flower Garden Quilt burgundy border. I have finished the third round on the left side and the right side. This involved adding 22 burgundy flowers, three of which were already in place last week.

I still have to decide what direction to face the central medallion before I decide which edge is going to be the top and which edge is going to be the bottom. It is actually an important decision because of the way the batik flowers and solid flowers interact. Given how many burgundy flowers I must make to flesh out the borders on this quilt, that decision can wait for a few more weeks. I’ll just build up a big pile of burgundy flowers in the mean time.

Now on to the corners…

I’ve been giving more thought to how I am going to approach the two corners on the bottom of the quilt. Last week I was considering using the flowers pictured below for the corners.

I am now thinking that I will save those flowers for something else, perhaps adding them to my collection of random scrappy flowers.

Instead of using the hybrid solid/batik flowers for the corners, I am planning on using the few totally batik flowers that I have left. I think it is important to pull those batik fabrics back into the quilt design near the edge.

I have a total of 14 of these flowers. That would give me seven for each corner.

When I first started combining flowers for the body of this quilt I had a bit of a false start when I put together three of these batik flowers with some green hexagons. It became clear to me that this was not going to yield the results I wanted, so I put this false beginning aside, and chose another path.

I always thought that I might later rescue these three flowers, but a look at the photo below shows that in my haste I removed papers from the hexagons along the middle making it very difficult to recover these three flowers later. Oh, and say “Hello” to an untrimmed batik hexie on the left side. How did I miss him?

Ripping out those seams would mean sewing a number of seams without reinforcement from paper pieces. That means I will be saving this piece and building something around it, perhaps with the hybrid flowers. I definitely won’t be recovering these three batik flowers. It would just involve too much work. It also means I am stuck with just seven batik flowers per corner to finish off my quilt.

Using the 14 flowers available to me gives me the following layout for my corners, which I think will work rather well.

You’ll undoubtedly notice the snow in the above photograph, and in the one below.

I was having a bit of fun with my staging area when I took these photos.

It had snowed the night before. This caused me to think about coming up with an alternative staging area for work in process. I already have the solution, but that’s another post.