Happy Flowers

I have Happy Flowers to a flimsy sans borders.

I know - I see it - you don't have to tell me. It's an assault to the eyes. But for now, let's pretend it's pretty and discuss the problems I have with construction. With both this, and my mother-in-laws quilt, it wasn't getting the triangles that formed the octagon to line up that was the problem. It's the squares, seen in purple in this quilt. You'd think that would be the easy part. But I've had a horrible time with both quilts.

In both, I made the triangles larger, in the hopes of getting better accuracy, and then trimmed them down to size. In my MIL's quilt, I trimmed with the block face up and just trimmed it square. In this block, I turned the block over, and put my ruler right on the seam lines in the hopes of getting better accuracy. If anyone has made a kaleidescope before and can give me some pointers, I sure would appreciate it. I love the block and can see me making many quilts out of it, but I've got to get some accuracy with those corner triangles.

But now, with that out of the way, we can go back to the sheer ugliness of the thing in it's current condition. I planned it for my daughter's bed, a twin size, and just didn't have enough of the happy flowers fabric in a single color to make it all one colorway. The Happy Flowers fabric looks very good with itself in all the colorways, and I really liked the way the Kona Bright Pink and Kona Lagoon looked with each other and with their respective Happy Flowers fabrics. I picked out the Kona Lavender as I wanted the squares to be less noticable and I thought a darker purple would battle with the pink & blue I chose. After putting it all together, I think the Lavender look awful with the other two, brighter and more saturated colors.

So when I got my daughter home from pre-school, I set this abomination and the beautiful frog quilt in front of her and told her to choose. Since she has eyes in her head, she obviously chose the frogs. I've removed it from my shop and it's now resting comfortably on her bed where it belongs. I didn't really want to sell that quilt anyway.

Having established that, I came to realize the biggest problem with this quilt is too many colors, and this pattern in general doesn't lend itself to the checkerboard effect I've thrust upon it. So I'm going to disassemble the blocks and make one pink and one blue quilt to sell, both toddler sized. I think those will look great, even with the purple squares. The purple actually looks nice against the pink, and not badly against the blue - it's the three colors together that doesn't work.