Sakura Quilt

This week I suddenly decided I needed to get a cherry blossom quilt made.  Everything else in the sewing room got pushed aside so that I could work on a Sakura wallhanging.

Back in December I found a pretty card at a stationary shop when I was browsing.  Cherry blossoms already in December!  I fell in love with the card and bought it thinking that it would make a nice quilt if I could ever get my mind and hands in motion.  The card has sat on my bookshelf since then and every so often I'd think that I really ought to make that quilt...  but there was still time before the cherry blossoms bloomed this year.

Well, the season is upon us!  In the more southern parts of Japan they are already blooming and if I didn't get around to it soon then I would have to put off making a seasonal quilt until next year again!

Of course I didn't really have any starting point...  What size, what fabrics etc.  I tried making a copy of the card in zoom mode on my printer but I could only get a copy the size of note book paper.  I didn't think I'd be able to do all the cutout work on such a small scale so I opted for sketching my own picture on the back of a calendar sheet...

 Hmm...  I may have a few more petals in there than in the card...

And then I traced the pattern onto Heat n Bond paper.  I made sure to color in all the lines that I wanted to leave from the cut out...  And then I bonded it all to a piece of mottled pink fabric.

Maybe I should have gone for solid pink but I found the pretty variegated pink at the fabric store and bought just a pre-cut piece.  I has a bit more peach color than I expected.  Ahh..  Yes, and using Heat n Bond means that the pattern got reversed which I did expect.  I'm not much of sketcher and I didn't think I could sketch the same pattern in reverse.  This placement makes it more my own I suppose...

The card's cut out pieces are three dimensional which makes it all the more lovely and I decided to Heat n Bond the few cherry blossoms making them sturdier and also backed in the same fabric.

They are not sewn together though so this quilt may not hold up in a wash... but I'm not planning to wash it much...  I only tacked the flowers in the center and left them floating.

My cherry blossom quilt is up on the wall for the rest of the season.

From this perspective the card and the quilt look the same size but they aren't...  The quilt is 11 inches by 16 inches.

I'll keep my hand drawn pattern in my sewing room in case I ever want to make this (in quieter colors) again.