Laurel

The Project Quilting topic for this week was to design a quilt inspired by the name of a town.  My inspiration for this challenge was Laurel, Maryland.  When I was born my family lived in Laurel, a little town where my dad (and also his mother before him) was born and raised.  I knew right away I wanted to do something with a Laurel flower. 

 I used a picture of the flower to design a stylized three-dimensional version of this pentagon shaped flower. 

To make the flowers, I layered two pieces of white print fabric right sides together, ironed a thin fusible interfacing to the back side, and marked pentagon shapes on the interfacing.  I sewed around the shapes on the line and cut them out just outside the line.  

I made a small clip on the back fabric, and turned them right side out and pressed. 

Then I sewed several small pleats into each flower to give it some shape.  

I attached the flowers to a darker background fabric so they would stand out, placed a small peach colored fabric circle in the center of each flower,  and strung green seed beads when sewing each flower to the quilt.  Then I frayed the edges of the peach center a little. 

The leaves were made by pieceing two strips of green fabrics together and then cutting out my leaves from that.  They were fused on and then blanket stitched around the edges. 

The quilting was done with an all over meander in a clear mono-filament thead to go well over the color changes of the lattice style borders. 

So this is my Project Quilting Challenge 2 project...Laurel ~ and it's making me wish for Spring while making it on these last few snowy days :)

Enjoy the day!
~ Dawn