Bloggers’ Quilt Festival ~ Daisy a Day

I’m a little late to the party, as usual, but I just couldn’t resist joining in the fun of Amy’s Bloggers’ Quilt Festival again. Twice a year she hosts this mammoth event attracting some of the finest show-and-tell you’ll see in the entire quilting blogosphere.

After my debut last year I’m back again, this time sharing my all-time favourite quilt (so far!), Daisy a Day. I’m entering it in the Bed Quilt category.

The moment I saw this design by Sandra Dart in Australian Patchwork & Quilting Vol 19 No 7 I knew I had to make it. Hers was called Waiting for Russell, but I named mine Daisy a Day because to me it looked like a carpet of daisies.  It’s also traditionally been known as Tea Leaves, Lafayette Orange Peel and Lover’s Knot.

There’s something about those petal shapes and the round, secondary patterns that’s just a delight to look at, and the idea of a pieced version of this classic Orange Peel shape rather than the popular applique version really appealed to me.

For my background I used a white-on-white spot, and then I hit my humungous scrap bag for some of the brightest, happiest fabrics I could find for the “petals” – Kaffe Fassett brights, jazzy stripes, dots, florals, even geometrics. In they went!

I used a 12 inch Tea Leaves template by Ardco, which I bought here. The rough, grippy underside made cutting the shapes easy on my sandpaper board.

It took me just 18 months to make the quilt top and I loved every minute of this journey. It lifted the spirits to look at these pretties every day!

The decision to hand- rather than machine-quilt was an easy one. I wanted my quilt to have a soft texture with the quilting visible, so I quilted in the white spaces 1/4 inch inside the seams.

With so many pieces to quilt I was worried I could easily miss one (or ten!) so I pinned every white space with a safety pin, counting them as I went. Then it was simply a matter of pulling out the pins as I went and, so that I could see my progress, I marked off the pins on a card as I went.

Amazingly it only took me 5 weeks to hand quilt this queen sized bed quilt.

 

With such a riot of colour in the petals I could have used just about any shade for the binding, but as usual bright pink called to me the loudest!

Stats:
88 in x 96 in (approx)
Daisy petals - Kaffe Fassett brights, along with other bright, modern scraps.
Background fabric - White tone-on-tone spot from the Polka Party III range by Holly Holderman for Lakehouse Drygoods
Warm & White Cotton batting.
Pieced and quilted by me by hand using Aurifil 40 weight thread in white (2024).

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Now off you go and enjoy all the other quilts in this fun Bloggers’ Quilt Festival for Spring 2013. The Bed Quilt category is here but there are plenty of other categories too.

Pick your favourites because next week you’ll be able to cast your vote for the best quilt in each category as well as Viewers’ Choice. And you can win for just leaving a comment on Amy’s blog.

Go on. You can do it while you drink your cuppa, and you won’t get sore feet looking at the exhibits .

Di