It’s been ages since I’ve documented a quilt finish! I was fortunate enough to have three quilts juried into QuiltCon this year, and this is one of them: Bloombox.

Bloombox is based on Sunday sketch #373, which I posted on 20 August 2023. I started making the quilt at a retreat in late August and finished it in time for QuiltCon submission by the end of October.

I purposely went for a busy, energetic design that crowds the space, with few places to rest your eye. I wanted it to feel a bit chaotic and messy, with the shapes (and the transparency effect of their overlap) taking a while to become clear.

I played around with colours for a while – but decided that I wanted to use solids from my stash. I always seem to have orange on hand, and I managed to dig out a dark green and a bright yellow, plus a light teal that worked as a believable mix between those two. They’re undoubtedly Kona Solids, but I’m not sure which ones (and I can’t check now, because the quilt is in the USA!).

When I originally created this design in Electric Quilt 8, I used a standard layout. When thinking about how to construct it, I realised that an on-point layout made more sense. That approach would let me break the design into columns (or rows) that would be much simpler and quicker to piece. The only diagonals would be the small half-square triangles where the petals of the flowers meet the centres.

Bloombox was quilted by Valerie Cooper of Sweet Gum Quilting using 1/2″ vertical straight-line stitching in a yellow thread.

I finished the quilt using a facing in orange. Oh, and when it was done, I decided to change the orientation so that the darker flowers were at the bottom left instead of the top left. It feels a bit more like they’re reaching up to the light.

I often find it hard to name quilts, but this one’s a mix of ‘bloom’ (the big shapes feel like flowers to me) and ‘boombox’ (big, noisy, boxy). Sometimes I just need a name that I can remember!

Bloombox was juried into the ‘Piecing’ category in QuiltCon 2024, which is on in Raleigh, NC, USA, from Thursday 22 to Sunday 25 February. Let me know if you see it there!