BLOOMS in Panama City

Last weekend at the Quilters Paradise retreat, hosted by Quilting By the Bay, my new pattern debuted.

After teaching "Blooms For Beginners & Other Flower Lovers" as a class for 5 or 6 years, I bowed to the many requests to turn it into a pattern.

The original wallhanging became the pattern cover

It is interesting to recall that this is yet another project inspired by Cherry-Cherry, who one day mentioned that some people would like to learn quilting, but don't want to make a Bear Paw or Ohio Star or other traditional blocks. They would like something contemporary or "artsy".
So I devised BLOOMS to teach some basic quick-piecing methods, with none of the seams needing to match, and even sneaked in designing-on-a-grid!

As most of my classes, this is basic enough for beginners, but provides a great creative "canvas" for the more experienced quilter to really take off on.

Here are some of the pieces done at the retreat:
Some students enjoyed making two-fabric flowers

Others made one-fabric flowers from two different fabrics
(I really like the reversed colors in this one!)

Fantasy flowers made of checked fabric! Beautiful!

And what happened to the other photos? I sure wish I knew! I am sorry to be missing the ones of the three ladies who had purchased kits made up for the class by QBTB. They all had red flowers, and each one was quite different!
We had lots of fun watching all the BLOOMS come into full flower, and discussing plans to embellish and quilt in some wonderful details.

Here is a picture of my teacher's table. Wasn't it nice to have a cup that matched my quilt?

The flowers in the original BLOOMS were made from one fabric that shaded orange to purple.
The lap size sample has shaded pink flowers.

Draping over the edge there is the lap quilt size I am still working on. It had borders, and I took them off because I really want to experiment with some checkerboard ideas.

So many quilts...so little time!
Electric Quilt helps a lot to run through ideas about settings, values, colors, etc. but eventually it just has to be done in fabric.