Everything is Always Rosie: Newest quilt for 2014

Hi everyone:

I seem to be a little behind in posting new posts but that is because I am back at school taking classes and very busy. Taking classes, doing homework, practicing my trumpet for 2 different bands and managing the house take up a lot of time.

I am however, starting a new quilt which I have been thinking about for some time. My last quilt (Sketches of Spring - Illuminating Spring) is finished and is waiting to go in for machine quilting. I am taking it into my friend next week and it should be back within 1-2 weeks, so I will post pictures of it once it is quilted.

In the meantime, I have been thinking about making this new quilt for some time. Our summer cottage is up in fruit country and in the summer, the whole area is filled with fruit orchards, vegetable patches and vineyards. I thought it would be nice to depict this beautiful area in a quilt, with garden patches of vegetables growing in rows and lines of fruit trees and grapevines. I have lots of ideas about how to do this and have started collecting fabrics from the sale bolts (like I always do). I have started making vegetable patches and below are some of the fabrics I will be using.

I am trying to use a lot of greens for the rows of vegetables.

I am going to use creams/taupes for the rows of soil between the vegetables.

I plan to do strips of berries alternating with rows of taupe soil.

I am going to use this fruit fabric to make trees - possibly like Lori Holt's in her Quilty Fun book.

I loved this wheat fabric.

Perhaps I will make a single patch of wild flowers.

This sale fabric, has long rows of cream/taupe designs which I cut into strips to use for the soil between the vegetable rows.

One of my vegetable rows. I am not sure how I like this yet. I may not end up using it.

You can't have a vegetable patch without strawberries. Each of these blocks finishes at 10"x10". If you look really close at the above 2 patches, you might see where I had to splice 2 strips together to make enough soil to finish the last row. Again, I always seem to have mistakes/problems but that is the beauty of patchwork, isn't it?

I couldn't help myself. I bought a little more fabric yesterday and couldn't resist this watermelon fabric.

I loved this daisy fabric and made a single 10"x10" square, like a field of wildflowers.

I loved this heirloom tomato fabric and will make rows with it as well.

The colours of this don't show very vividly, but the greens are very bright. I plan to use strips of this to suggest that the whole quilt is farmland.