I've Spent Days Whining About Roses

One of the challenges at the Adelaide Retreat was to make a table topper in keeping with the theme of Days of Wine and Roses. I'm always up for a challenge but, not being a real flower girl, was struggling a bit. So, I decided to take another tack and, instead of following the theme to have a bit of a play on words.

I bought some fabrics with big roses (or similar flowers) printed on them. I was tempted to buy other fabrics, any other fabrics, but forced myself to stick with roses. But I wasn't happy and was not very successful at keeping it to myself, much to the amusement of the ladies at my local patchwork shop.

I ironed vlysofix on the back of the fabrics and cut out the big flowers. I'd already picked a pink rose fabric for the background so peeled off the papers and started laying out the first round of flowers, some big red roses.

The next layer was some flowers from a Kaffe Fassett print.

I filled in the centre with some yellow and orange flowers that were sort of rose-like (if you didn't look too closely). I used my carpet as my design wall and ironed down the three circles of flowers after the yellow ones were in place.

I quilted it starting from the centre and worked my way out, round by round, to the edge of the piece using up some variegated threads that sort of were in keeping with the colour scheme.

Some close-up photos of the finished quilt, appropriately named I've Spent Days Whining about Roses.

I finished it with a facing instead of a binding and the backing fabric was chosen to represent my creative pain and whining.