Tulips |

Sometimes, good things are a long time coming, like this adorable, tulip-filled wall hanging.

The pattern, Field of Flowers, was purchased long ago when I visited my hometown for my 20-year class reunion.

After returning home from the reunion, the pattern was tucked away in my crafting space, as I was busy with a toddler and pregnant with our second son, who was causing me to feel like I had Epstein Barr – zero energy and a chronic, overwhelming need to sleep.

Several years later, during a rare weekday moment with no kids, I took the pattern to a quilt store and purchased a bunch of fabrics for it, mostly quarter-yard cuts.

This Kona Bay blue was the starting point. I loved it so much I bought a whole yard just so I would always have extra.

This white-on-white tulip print was perfect.

This Hoffman print has a wonderful hand to it.

I dutifully washed and ironed the fabrics, draped them neatly on a hanger and tucked them into the back of the guest room closet. There they stayed until the fall of 2020 when I turned to this project in hopes of bringing myself out of a Covid-induced sewing slump, and to my surprise, I kept after it and finished it in February this year.

To start, I pulled all the fabrics that had been in hiding for two decades, scanned and imported them into Electric Quilt so they could be plugged into the layout for a general review.

The three greens chosen for the leaves and stems looked good, but there were issues with a couple of the prints chosen for the tulips.

The yellow and purple prints were too light, causing those tulips to appear washed out, and the pink used for the lower right tulip was too dark. No problem – fabric stash to the rescue.

As I auditioned the fabrics, I thought it would be fun to show a final comparison of those purchased 20 years ago versus those that ended up in the final quilt and grade myself on how well I chose the original fabrics. I took photos of everything (below) and made notes, in the end learning that I did okay, using 2/3 of what was purchased. Hey, it was more than half, right? More important is that I still like all the original fabrics; they’re not duds because they weren’t used in this quilt; they just became available for a future quilt.

In hindsight, this little wall hanging was deceptively more work than its looks reveal: In addition to all the triangles required for the tulip and leaf units, creating the stems and piecing them into the block was quite the challenge.

The instructions called for a 1¼” wide piece of fabric, sewn wrong sides together with a ¼” seam.

The seam allowance is then trimmed to ⅛” and pressed so that it is not visible from the front side. The instructions were unclear whether to press the seam allowance open or to one side, so I decided to press it open to evenly distribute the bulk across what would be a ⅜” finished width. The challenge was how to do it smoothly. I asked John if he had anything in his shop that might help, and he found this:

It worked perfectly – just like a sleeve ham used for making garments.

The metal shaft was narrow enough in diameter to fit inside the fabric tube but wide enough to support the seam allowance as the iron was run along its length to open it.

What resulted was a superbly crisp, smooth and flat little fabric stem.

The other challenge with the stems was getting them centered over the seam joining the two leaf units while aligning the stem’s center with the point at the bottom of the tulip.

After multiple tries, it was clear that even the most careful pinning was not working so I basted them in place

and got closer to the result I wanted.

One perplexing thing was that the pattern did not address the five loose loops of stem fabric that resulted from the way they were sewn into the top. I took the extra step to hand tack the stems along each side using matching embroidery floss.