You really can’t go wrong with a bright, happy floral design!

It’s fairly unusual for me to fill a design with blocks; often I’ll add a border so you can see the edges of the blocks clearly too. But here I couldn’t help it. These blocks are just so retro and FUN, it felt like they needed to take up as much space as possible.

I created the design in Electric Quilt 8 using two alternating blocks – one in black and pale peach (the background colour), in which 4 quarter-circle units create those large curvy diamonds, and one with the coloured flowers. The coloured flowers have black around the outside so they can join with the large black curves in adjacent blocks.

OK, here’s a version with a border. Most of the blocks around the outside are half-blocks, with some elements coloured in the background colour to make things a little more interesting.

In a two-colour version, the centres of the small flowers end up coloured in. I added some of those shapes back in around the outside of the design, just for an added bit of fun. I think of them as little pollen particles escaping from the flowers!

   

Other elements of the outer blocks can be removed to create different sizes and shapes for the layout. I like how some of those sharp edges around the outside compete with the rounded flowery shapes in the middle.

   

Back to the full, multicoloured layout. I also liked the idea of removing some whole blocks as well as some partial blocks, to create an interesting edge profile.

Taking it one step further, I removed those edge flowers to leave behind some of those pointy curves.

You can probably tell that making any of these designs into a quilt would require curves – large ones and small ones. I described the design as comprising two blocks, but you could also treat it as one block (a kind of black apple-core shape) rotated and repeated. Either way, you’ll need large quarter-circle units, then four times as many small quarter-circle units (half the size of the large ones). If you made the blocks 12″ (finished), the large quarter-circle unit would need to be 6″ square, while the smaller ones would need to be 3″ square. (That’s about the lower limit of my curve-sewing ability.)

I really like the later versions I’ve shown here. That last version led me down a slightly different path, so I’ll have more flowery designs to share next week!