Garden Border Print for Mom!

Mother's Day is just next week and this week's design is for my Mom Claire!

Claire's Garden
©2015 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved.

My Mom loves flowers and she taught me the names of so many when I was growing up. With eight kids, various dogs, hamsters, turtles, fish and even a rabbit, things could get a little crazy at our house. In all of the chaos, my Mom found joy in her flower arrangement on the kitchen table. (It was sometimes the only thing that she could control and it brought her to a happy place.)

As I'm writing this memories of my childhood and picking flowers with my sisters from the woods next to our house are flooding my mind. Lily of the valley grew wild along with the 'turks cap' tiger lilies and the Queen Anne's Lace was everywhere... we loved to pick them for our beautiful Mom.

My sisters and I have raised our kids with fresh flowers on our tables as a reminder that we should appreciate the little things.

Love you Mom!

In honor of Mom, Spoonflower asked it's designer's to create a floral border print design to be previewed at the one yard size (42" x 36"). This type of print could be used for skirts, dresses, aprons or even for home dec use!

Voting will open on Thursday, April 30th. Vote Here!

'Love Garden' Cheater Quilt

these colors + white

The challenge of the week... Design a cheater quilt with a spring floral theme using the restricted palette below and white. Cheater quilt blocks feature fabric designed and printed to look like patchwork or applique so that you can skip the piecework and go straight for quilting.

I started this challenge with developing a focal point design and then designed coordinate patterns using elements and icons from the original design.  I drew tons of flowers and birds with a paintbrush and india ink, then drew a ton more with a black marker. I scanned the images and arranged them into a pattern that worked for me in photoshop and played with the colors required for the challenge. (Also in Photoshop). 

'Love Garden' Peacock Floral…

'love garden' peacock floral

 Once I had the focal point design I moved on to design coordinating patterns to use in my cheater quilt design. I wanted to design a few small print designs… dots, small florals (ditsy prints), and a stripe to use with my peacock design as well as incorporating solids to keep the overall design feeling modern.

daisy dot (orange)

'love garden' stripe #3

'love garden' swoop

queen anne's lace

ditsy daisy dot (puce)

When the print and coordinates were finished I moved on to the quilt block design itself. I drew a square and marked the center and measured an inch above, below and side to side. Took a plate from my kitchen and drew a curve. Then I scanned the curve into photoshop. I copied and pasted the curves until I had a design that I liked.
When the square was done I opened a new file in Photoshop to be 1/4 of the fat quarter size (9"x 10.5"). I copied the block and stretched the square to the new block size which would make my finished design have a large oval when duplicated. (Four blocks appear in a fat quarter, 16 squares appear in a yard of fabric.)
I copied and pasted the fabric patterns into the block shapes and moved them around until I liked the look. I used some solids here and there as well.
The finished design…

'love garden' - cheater floral quilt block ©2013 Patty Rybolt Designs

Design previews were presented as a fat quarter(21" x 18"). Deadline for entry was January 7th, 2014, voting is now through January 16th 2014! Please Vote!