My Garden Growing

I thought it was about time for a Grandmother's Flower Garden Update. I'm happy to see that I have accomplished quite a bit in the last months - as it should be, since this is the only project I really work on consistently. I'm also happy to find that I like it pretty well - all along I've been worried that I would end up hating the color scheme since it's not my usual thing. According to "math" I have enough flowers done to make it twin size (about 60 x 80), although it didn't really look that big to me laid out. Regardless, I want it to be double size, so I can either make nine more flowers or do a border. I like the idea of doing more flowers, even though it's more time consuming, however I am out of suitable fabric - both in my stash and mom's stash (I'm pretty sure I exhausted the options on the last trip home).



So to do more flowers I could either purchase nine more fabrics ( a quarter or an eighth is really enough) or try to swap for them, which might be more satisfying, but also logistically more complicated. All the fabrics I've used so far are good quality quilting cottons. All the blessed hours of handwork that are going into this make me think of it as somewhat of an heirloom, and that makes me want to stick with quality fabrics. The other option is that I could forget 9 more flowers and just do a border. I feel like GFG quilts often (or "usually"?) don't have borders, and I also like the idea of an all over design. However a border would probably be easier than more flowers. I don't know; I'll be mulling it over for a while...



I've been meaning to blog about the four seasons tree quilt seen in this post. I was really struck by it, because it's soooo much like a quilt idea I've had in my idea book for at least the last 7 years. I scribbled a VERY similar tree on an order pad one night at work way back when I worked for Steak 'n Shake. I had the idea that I would do it as a four block "four seasons" quilt. I tucked the page from the order pad into my idea binder where it still is to this day. No one else ever saw it or knew about it. It just amazes me that two human brains could independently come up with the same thing like that, although there's absolutely no other explanation. (I know it's not the most complicated or unusual idea in the world, but still...) I suppose it's possible that we somehow both saw the same something that inspired us, although I don't even remember any particular inspiration. But maybe this kind of thing really happens all the time? Anyway, there's not much point to this except to say that I'm fascinated by it. Makes me wonder about the times when people get up in arms about having their idea "copied". I'm sure some people really do copy sometimes, and that sucks. But this proves to me that it is possible to independently have the same idea...