November Challenge - Snowball Block

November's challenge was to use the snowball block in our design.  A snowball block is basically a square of fabric with triangles sewn onto the four corners.  Depending on the size of your square and triangles, this sort of rounds out the block and makes it look a bit like a circle.  With red as the final color I had left from my rainbow challenge bundle of fabrics, I thought of flowers.

Initially I thought I could salvage last month's rejected blocks and use them like flower petals.  But that wasn't working for me either so I guess I'll just have to hang on to those for some other project down the line.  I'll figure out a way to use them eventually.

Still thinking flowers, I decided I would just quilt a flower shape, like a daisy, into each snowball.  So I started from there.  I got as far as piecing four snowball blocks together and then had to figure out what was going to fill up the rest of the space so I played with some various applique shapes until I came up with a design I liked.

I was trying to explain my vision to Hubby Tom but he just wasn't seeing the daisies in the snowballs.  Within seconds he had drawn out a new flower idea.  Brilliant!  I could make them roses.

Finally it was all coming together.  Once all the hand stitched applique was in place, time to quilt.  The roses came out great!  I wanted a pretty dense fill for the background so that the roses and applique would really stand out so I tried my hand at a quilting technique known as McTavishing - named after the woman who popularized it.  For a first try, I was happy with the results.  Since the overall design felt very traditional to me, I chose traditional feathers for the outer border.  All that was left was to come up with a name.

Snowball Bouquet

I like the backside too.

Don't forget to check out Persimon Dreams - Focus Through the Prism Challenge to see the wonderful pieces submitted by the rest of the participants in this fun challenge.