Quilt Con will be over in a few hours. I wanted very much to go, but it just wasn’t possible this year. I’m a bit jealous of those who were able to attend, and hope some year to be among their number.

Last week I made 20 burgundy flowers for my Batik Flower Garden Quilt. This week I made another 20 burgundy flowers which will give me 40 burgundy flowers to create one more round of flowers on the two sides as well as the bottom of the quilt.

Lori has recently discovered that she likes to hang out in the laundry basket that I use to transport my quilting supplies from one location to another.

What she really likes, however, is to plant herself down on my work in progress, especially if I leave it on her chair, which I sometimes do without thinking about it.

Lori is mostly white, so this is the result of her napping on my Batik Flower Garden Quilt for a couple of days. I took a lint brush to the quilt top and stored it out of the way where she can’t sleep on it anymore.

Here is my progress for the week. I assembled twenty more burgundy flowers like these:

Since I started working with hexagons I have been saving my used paper pieces in plastic containers. I now have about ten gallons of one inch hexagon papers, and I think it is time to memorialize them with an aesthetically pleasing photo shoot, and then quietly let them go. It is time to recycling them.

I started saving these pieces because I thought I might use them more than once. I actually did use some of them more than once, but not too many of them. I used to pierce my papers when I basted my hexagons, but no more. In spite of the fact that I believe that piercing the papers is the best way for beginners to learn to paper piece, I am no longer a beginner. If I were not a blogger I would probably continue to pierce my pieces as I baste because it is easier, and I would probably reuse my papers at least once. However, I have come to enjoy the way my progress photos look with no basting stitches to mar their appearance. For that effect I need nice new flat papers each time. I cut them myself too rather than wasting money on them.

After I gave up the idea of reusing my papers I continued to save them for awhile because it gave me a feeling of satisfaction to see them piling up, but at this point I don’t need that kind of feedback anymore. I know how hard I am working and what kind of progress I am making, and my used paper pieces are just taking up space. So away they go…

Now for my progress this week on my English Paper Piecing…

I decided to take a break from the Batik Flower Garden Quilt because I am nearly out of the burgundy thread I am using to piece my flowers. I’ll be going to the Pennington Quilt Works this coming Tuesday for a guild meeting, so I decided to wait until then to replenish my supply of burgundy thread.

Last week The Missouri Star Quilt Company had a deal on Windham Fabrics Ivory Basics Jelly rolls. I decided to buy one, and it has already arrived. These fabrics are a collection of low volume prints.

They ran the same special last summer. You can only buy one of the special at the reduced price. I bought a roll at that time too, and cut the entire roll into 2.5″ squares to be made into one inch hexagons. I’d seen so much about “low volume” work that I wanted to make some low volume hexagons even though I wasn’t sure how i was going to use them.

Here is the photo of my first jelly roll cut into squares. I had posted it at the time of the U.S. Go Congress:

I spent the majority of my week basting these squares into hexagons. I have basted about a third of the first jelly roll. By the time I get done with the second jelly roll I will have quite a collection of low volume hexagons. Then I’ll think about what to do with them.

I basted 116 low volume hexagons this week.

I’m a big fan of basting hexagons with no particular purpose in mind. I sometimes stitch together units with no particular purpose in mind. I just have faith that the ideas will come.

The patterns in this collection are often subtle. The photos below show the back and front of one of the fabrics.

In addition to my low volume hexagon basting, I also based burgundy and crimson hexagons for the Batik Flower Garden Quilt. I could do that without the burgundy thread on hand.

Previously I had mentioned that I had not yet decided which direction to face the central medallion on the Batik Flower Garden Quilt.

This is no small matter because the interaction of the batik flowers and the solid flowers create a secondary design in the form of a flower with a hunter green center.

Below we see the batik flower and the solid flower which make up the body of the central medallion. Both of these flowers are oriented in the same direction as far as the brown vs. caramel content of the flower is concerned. In hindsight I might done better to invert the solid flowers, which would have given an entirely different, perhaps more satisfactory, result. However, now I must continue on the path I have chosen.

Below you can see the secondary design created when these two flower types are placed in alternating rows.

These newly created flowers are composed of arcs of caramel and brown fabric. They are clearly divided in half by way of their color, and it matters which direction these arcs will face. I have to ask myself if it is more pleasing to have the caramel on top, or the brown on top. It is this question that I have been pondering for a number of weeks now.

I believe that I have come to a decision.

That decision was reached through a perceived emotional impact of the caramel arcs. When they take an upward direction the design feels more optimistic as if the caramel arcs represent a rising sun over a landscape. It is as simple as that.

This week I attached two rows of burgundy flowers to the bottom of the quilt, making the caramel arcs face irreversibly up.