Thankful Wreath Quilt with Sweet Peas

Tuesday and a half ago, I said I was starting on a thanksgiving-themed wall quilt in Blossom Batiks – Splash fabrics. It’s getting there…..

When my samples of Blossom Batiks – Splash fabrics from RJR arrived in the post, the first thing they reminded me of was sweet pea flowers. Probably because my hubby’s Gran used to grow sweet peas every year, in colours not dissimilar to these. Blue-green leaves and two-tone purple flowers.

And as it turns out, this was a very helpful association to have. Because, as well as the October Beary Colourful bears, I had promised RJR a thankfulness-themed project featuring these fabrics. And……. when I did some research I found out that giving sweet pea flowers as a gift means “thank you”. “Thank you” in general, and more specifically “Thank you for a nice time”.

And from this connection, an idea was born!

To follow the development of my thankfulness wreath quilt so far and also collect a 20% discount code for Electric Quilt products valid until 23rd October 2018. read on.

Thanksgiving across cultures and seasons

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving as such here in Australia. And certainly not at this time of year, as it is not harvest season. Of course, it is spring here now – time to enjoy fresh growth and flowers. In our Autumn, some traditional churches will have a harvest thanksgiving service, but it is not a holiday, and it isn’t celebrated with family or festival food in any widespread way. In fact, I have observed that the celebrations that do occur are now almost an exclusively rural phenomenon.

But being thankful is a good life skill to have no matter where one lives. And for several years, always around this time of year, thanks largely to USA influence, I have wanted to make a little gratitude-themed wall quilt. Something I can put up anytime as a gentle reminder to be grateful for all the goodness in my relatively privileged life. A sweet little flower wreath would be just the ticket.

Progress on my thankfulness quilt so far

As you’ve seen, I have my fabrics to work with, thanks to RJR Fabrics.

I started with these fabrics and came up with a concept drawing of sweet peas for gratitude, arranged in a wreath. Using my brother ScanNcut, I cut out all the leaves and flowers in a jiffy. I am still totally grateful for this new tool in my life!

Using a full size printout of  my drawing underneath, I was able to easily place and fuse the leaves onto a 22″ square piece of white cotton.

I traced the stems and tendrils with pencil. A lot of these will be covered with flowers, but it is easiest to free-motion embroider them as continuous lines. And also it means I can move the flowers around without worrying about covering gaps in the background.

I appliquéd the leaves with a light teal 40wt rayon thread from Madeira. I travelled between the leaves along the stem lines.

These travel stitches were covered up when I stitched in the stems with a greener-teal Madeira rayon.

The wreath stems and pea tendrils were stitched at least 5 times to build up a good thickness of thread.

I arranged the pea flower display on baking (parchment) paper over a printed template until I was happy with the layout and colour distribution.

Then I transferred the sweet pea flowers to the wreath and fused them down. That is as far as I got this week. I will stitch these appliqués down soon and add the lettering.

There will have to be some tweaking involved to simplify this pattern before I can draw it out for download. But as I said earlier, it is getting there. 🙂

If you are in the market for something from EQ, here’s something to be thankful for!

Marian of Seams to be Sew has organised you one last gift from the My Happy Place row-along that concluded on Tuesday.

As part of their support of Marian’s row-along, Electric Quilt is offering a 20% off coupon until October 23, 2018, for any of their products except EQ Academy. This is a great discount if you’ve been thinking about purchasing or upgrading EQ, or even purchasing some of the add-ons. The coupon code is:

STBSRA20

Time for a little early Christmas present shopping perhaps?! I hope Santa is grateful for the help  🙂

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Would you like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I design as well as find all over the internet? You can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Don’t forget to link up all your current quilting projects on Tuesdays at our Colour Inspiration Linky parties! And if you’d like to road test my newest patterns, I am always on the hunt for keen pattern testers.

The Chameleon turns rainbow with pleasure when he hears from you. I am more reserved, so I will respond in gratitude by email instead. Now that it’s your turn…. Scroll right to the end, leave me a comment and tell me, what do you think? Thanks for connecting!