My Grandmother’s Kind of Flower Garden!

Grandmother’s Flower Garden is a very traditional quilt design that I consider to be ‘a right of passage’ for any quilter worth their salt to attempt to make. It uses the English Paper Piecing method where each small hexagon is hand turned and stitched to another until eventually (around 1 million hexagons later) you have a quilt top.

You may have guessed, from my (slightly) sarcastic over estimation of the number of hexagons involved, that despite my best intentions I gave up well before the magic number was reached and in fact may never be able to stitch another hexagon again.

That left me with a very practical question: What do I do with all the hexagon flower blocks that I had finished? It seemed a shame for them to sit in the project box and I did really like them even if they were a little too traditional for my own style. Therein lay the solution, I decided to use some of the more modern low-volume backgrounds as base blocks and appliqué the flower blocks onto them to form a standard block that could be machine pieced into a quilt top!

The next problem to solve was that I did have quite a few finished blocks, and a stack of partially made flower blocks that were smaller (only 2 rounds of hexagons) but I remembered that I had made a few sample appliqué blocks with my freezer paper experiments from the same fabric that would match in with the grandmother’s flower garden blocks. Then I just had to work out how to make all the different blocks work together in the layout.

Mission was finally accomplished and I love the resulting quilt. It is one the I have kept as it reminds me of my lovely grandma Isabel who took great care of me, loved me and encouraged me to believe that anything is possible. She loved traditions but also was a very practical person who taught me lots of her tips and tricks to make life easier. Her golden piece of advice: “Read the directions!” I love and miss her still.

That a wrap from me, take a look at the gallery to see some of the process behind making this quilt. One image shows me marking up the possible block sizes on my phone. I have even included a close up of the hand stitching!

Have a great day, try something you haven’t done before, and most of all — happy quilting!