What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

I have thought that the background colour of some of these designs is wrong, but then I remember that bush fires leave behind a blackened landscape, which is home to a lot of seeds of plants which start growing after rain, and are soon producing flowers.

Once the flora starts showing their colours, the fauna also come out to enjoy the new growth, including our native hopping mouse which is unrelated to the average mouse, but is part of the marsupial species which thrive in Australia.

Sturt Desert Peas grow in deserts, and appear after rain to form a mat of foliage with the red flowers sitting well above the foliage. I have had them grow in my garden once, though my Mother had them grow every year in a bit of dirt held in place with an old tyre. We were not allowed to play in that little patch of dirt so just as well we had a whole farm to play in!

Love the second design … a garden bed I can only dream about!

I started playing with custom designs quite a fair while ago, and drew up a lot of pieced blocks with just vertical and horizontal lines to use. This morning I decided to try using one of them to introduce a new collection of blocks.

One of the first problems is that the blocks placed in assorted rectangles get rather distorted, so I spent time to redraw some blocks. Need more practice with this great idea.

I am rather pleased with the second design, though I admit that several versions got deleted along the way.

It has been a weird summer, but in the last twenty four hours we have had enough rain to wash some of the dust off, and maybe in the not too distant future Sturt Desert Peas will appear.

In the meantime I can play with some designs featuring one of our most striking native flowers. In my designs I can control a plant which naturally sprawls over the ground like a soft green and bright red carpet.

Only the shapes of the flowers really look like Aussie Bush flowers … I have used faded colours instead of the bright reds and yellows of many of the well known Australian native flowers.

Changed swags in both the swag borders, and the flowers in one, and made some of the flowers fade even more. I wonder if plant breeders are trying to create new varieties of our flowers.

The first design should be called Wattles and Gum nuts, but I liked it too much to just leave it in an unused project file, just because it doesn’t fir the file title.

The second one fits the title, and I love it.