Spruce It Up Quilting: Falling for Sunflowers

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Falling for Sunflowers

These days as I walk towards my sewing room, I am reminded of our father who loved his sunflowers! Last year, I fell in love with this fabric panel at a quilt shop in Palm Springs and just had to have it. It reminded me of Dad... It hangs just outside my sewing studio.

I had just gotten back to machine quilting after a long hiatus and this was my "first" piece of the season. This is before Lolah, some free motion quilting and ditch work.

We cherish our reminders... this is a memory quilt I made for our mother after Dad died. I salvaged his plaid shirts, pyjamas, bathrobe and used those fabrics for the backing.

The front is a collection of memories we have of our yearly family reunions and other photos.

Notice the sunflower at the bottom right...

And here he is standing near his largest sunflowers... our father was 6' tall... these were amazingly tall flowers.

I machine quilted every family member's name (children, grandchildren, great grand daughter) on the borders and all the nicknames we had for him.

With the remainder of the fabrics from Dad's clothing, I made each family member a Christmas bell-pull.

Found this pattern in a Christmas magazine that year and knew instantly what I was going to use to make them.

The stars are from his neckties, the buttons are off his shirts, all the fabric from his clothing except for the batting which I used for the snowmen.

Christmas was a big part of our lives; mom used to start playing Christmas carols in August as soon as we went back to school. Dad would decorate outside, get the tree from the woods in early December and set it up for us to decorate.

My brother-in-law has the old wheelbarrow that our father used to ride us in... of course that was not the primary purpose of this wagon but anytime there was nothing on it, we ran to jump on for a ride!

This brother-in-law has the most fabulous garden. Every year whenever we visit, there's something new to see. Someday I may share more of his work which is truly a labor of love for anything beautiful! These are a few of his sunflowers...