Cosmos, Part 2

Welcome back to Part 2 of the story behind Cosmos! Today I’m going to talk about how I designed the flower motif and master pattern for the applique, and how I assembled the quilt top.

The cosmos flowers on my balcony were of the species chocolate cosmos, and although I adored the colour and scent (they do smell of chocolate!), I soon realised that what I was really after in my design was the more common species with bigger petals.

So I returned once more to cosmology – the study of cosmos.

When I had drawn enough flower heads to choose from I scanned my favourites and played with the size until I hit the right proportions. To help me with that, I printed, cut out and shuffled around the flowers on the fabric I’d created until I was happy with how it looked.

The arrangement of the flower heads may sound simple enough, but bear in mind that I also needed to take the, as yet, unexisting flower stems into account. The tilt of the flower heads had direct consequences for the direction of the stems. In fact, finding a pleasing composition for the stems proved to be a lot trickier than I had thought. I made good use of my eraser.

When I was happy with the rhythm of the stems it was time to refine the drawing and to ink it. After that I had my master pattern and was ready to start with the applique.

I like to work with fused applique, and in this quilt I wanted white flowers on a dark background. I knew from the start that the best solution for this design would be to use reversed applique, i.e. to fuse the dark background onto a white fabric instead of white flowers onto a dark background. That way the white would stay pure as there would not be a dark fabric underneath it. Also, it would have been quite difficult to cut out and manoeuvre the long, thin and entangled stems without fraying the edges. The background applique pieces would be easier to handle. So I drew the design onto paper-backed fusible web and ironed it to the back of the background fabric. And then I started cutting up my beloved nebula fabric…

To keep track of all the pieces I used masking tape to attach them to the master pattern.

When all the pieces were cut out, it was time to arrange them on the white fabric and to use an iron to fuse everything into place.

Finally, I transferred the lines in the flower heads onto the white fabric with a permanent pen. I was now ready to start sewing.

And that is all for now. Next time I will continue the story with the machine quilting phase. Thank you for visiting and I hope see you again!