The Garden of Earthly Delights

Finally it's time to show you the quilt that started life as an Instagram challenge. I discovered it back at the beginning of August on the@GnomeAngel Instagram feed. Her proper name is Angie and you can find her here.  The idea was to make all the 100 blocks of the 100 Modern Quilt Blocks book; Tula Pink's City Sampler over a period of 100 days using the hashtag #100days100blocks. I first spotted the sampler book and quilt on the Gotham Quilts stand at the Brooklyn Quilters' Guild exhibition during our visit to New York, and had bought the book.

As luck would have it I needed a good excuse to buy a fabric line I had totally fallen in love with (always good to be able to justify such an indulgence!). I found it at Biggar Stitches and it's called The Garden of Earthly Delights, designed by Studio KM for FreeSpirit Fabrics, and of course inspired by the painting of the same name by Hieronymus Bosch. I ended up buying the complete range! Naughty but very nice indeed.

The idea was to upload one block (finished size 6") every day starting at  block no. 1 and finishing at no. 100 from August to November last year. At the time our dog Rueben was already ill and my head was not in the right place to design new work so in the interim I decided it would do me no harm to make these blocks, and enjoy playing with my fabrics. Despite the sadness of Rueben's death on the 29th September I managed to carry on and complete the project, just a few days after the arrival of our delightful Flora.

The 100 blocks lingered in my studio but there was a new challenge on Instagram: to put the blocks together and post them on Instagram by tomorrow (25th Jan) using the hashtag #100blocksfinished.

The book itself gives a variety of different ways of joining the blocks but I wasn't very taken with any of them. I wanted the quilt to look like a secret garden so decided to add an extra round of strips to each block to make them finished size 20cm and I'm very pleased with the results. I sewed them together so that I can participate in the challenge although I will probably still add an additional border around the entire quilt using one of the fabrics.

Today was the moment to photograph the blocks. Sadly it is a dismal day for picture taking, grey and damp, with wind so this is the best I could do with the help of my able assistant whose arms were not quite long enough. Flora too wanted to participate in the fun and why not. A garden of earthly delight would not be complete without a dog, as least as far as I am concerned.

I am going to send the quilt out to be long arm machine quilted and when all that is done I will endeavour to photograph it again in a much more official and better manner but I thought I would share the whole idea of it now.

It's so worthwhile checking out Instagram for quilt projects. There are lots of them about and @gnomeangel is an excellent place to start. This Australian modern quilter is really on top of things and organizes many projects herself as well as pointing you in the right direction to other activities.

You can also find me on Instagram as @friedaquilter.