Grandmother's Flower Garden

I've been recovering for the past two weeks from some kind of food poisoning. I don't know for sure where I got it, but I have a pretty good idea. I think it was from a local BBQ stand. Anyway, it was miserable. I've never had anything like it before and I hope I never do again. I've been really careful since then what I put in my mouth. I don't want to overload my stomach, so I've been eating fairly bland foods and just sort of grazing all day rather than eating large amounts at 3 meals. I'm still paranoid and afraid I'll get sick again.

After that ordeal I didn't feel like doing anything. It was a whole week before I began to get my enthusiasm back for crafty projects. I was watching TV over the weekend and happened to land on a quilt show called Sewing With Nancy on my local PBS station. I only caught the end of the program, but it was about binding quilts and all the different ways you can do it. This episode featured instructions from her book and CD, The Quilter's Edge (which I ordered by the way). I saw a really pretty Prairie Point technique that I want to try sometime, but the one that I was really interested in was how to bind a Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt. There are all kinds of different ways to do it, but I was interested in her technique. It's hard to describe here but, hopefully, when I'm finished it will be obvious how I did it and I'll describe more at that time. I remembered a Grandmother's Flower Garden pattern that I had started last winter with the idea that I would make a queen size bed quilt. I really enjoyed the hand piecing, but knowing myself and how I tend to put projects down after awhile, I put it back in favor of another project. I guess I always knew in the back of my mind that I would never be able to finish a bed size quilt. Anyway, after seeing this episode of Sewing With Nancy, I decided to dig it back out and make a wall hanging out of it.


I really love this pattern and I enjoy sewing it. It's a bit tedious and cumbersome at times. You have to sew one side of the hexagon and then pivot to get the next one. It's not too bad at first, but when the quilt top starts to get larger, you have to man handle the thing, so to speak, to get it pivoted the way you want. I guess I like it because I can sit in the same room with Eddie and watch TV with him or talk to him. It's not only that, but I realize that more and more I like projects that I can do by hand, such as embroidery, hand sewing, quilting, etc. It's just nice and relaxing.