Flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la

This new quilt is an experiment. For about 24 hours I thought I'd chuck it out because I was very unhappy with my planning of how the second layer of material I would cut through worked, and I didn't like the black background -- still don't. But then I decided to carry on and see how it would turn out. I like the hand dyed top fabric and hated to just discard it.

Finally I decided it is a step in the learning process and hung it up to live and learn with it for a while. The title is, as above, "Flowers that Bloom in the Spring, Tra-lal" The squares of quilting should be more consistently equal but I decided I wanted to cut the X-es into the top and second layer in the kind of random way flowers, even when planted neatly in a flowerbed, do not come up all perfectly aligned and the same size. When trying to iron the "flowers" open they never fold out exactly and they often bounce back to nearly closed. I like that it suggests flowers at different stages but I think I'll take it down and do some more ironing. My final decision was to add the half dozen flower shaped buttons I had in my stash. I think sometime I will make another version and work on the under-layer colors. It seems to me utterly counterintuitive to sew these layers together and then to cut into them leaving the raw edges. But it's a wall quilt and the fabrics are tightly woven so they will not ravel. So another step in the new techniques road.