Back in 1994 when I first started patchwork & quilting I picked up 2 Fat 1/4 bundles of purple, green & brown fabrics. At the time I didn’t really know what I had, like most of us I bought them because I liked them.  So that was the start of my slowing dawning interest in reproduction & Smithsonian fabrics.

As well as those 2 Fat 1/4 bundles, I also picked up odds and sods of different pieces, still unbeknownst to me,  Smithsonian fabrics.  At the time I didn’t really have any interest in needle-turn appliqué either so I didn’t use them much.

Smithsonian fabrics - mainly Rising Sun range

With young children, I found I didn’t have much time for patchwork for a few years, so I carefully put all my projects & fabrics away until around about 1999, when I had moved into the city, was walking past a patchwork shop in Essendon, I think, and saw a quilt class sampler in the shop window and decided I loved it.

The quilt was a Robyn Falloon quilt, a vase with flowers.  I knew exactly what fabrics I wanted to base my quilt around.  Yes, those purples and greens it that range I’d picked up some years earlier at Primarily.

Medallion Quilt with Smithsonian fabric

You can see the vase is from Rising Sun’s ‘Tulip’ in purple and stems in two greens from the fabric swatch above.  If you look at the setting triangles, that is ‘Potpourri’ with smaller bits of Smithsonian in the border squares.

Yes that poor quilt got put away again, not to see the light of day until maybe two years ago when I started in on it again.  For those of you that know your fabrics you’ll pick up that the leaves are from ‘Colonies Cheddar & Poison Greens’ by Nancy Gere for Windham.

Smithsonian fabrics - mainly Rising Sun

And these last few pieces of Groom’s & Copp quilts fabric,  as well which I picked up on Etsy last year.

Groom's & Copp quilts fabric

I’ve used that red fabric in my Abbeville County quilt and my Flying Geese quilt so there’s not much left, maybe enough for some flowers & buds in my new Basket of Roses quilt that I’m just drawing up.  More about that and my most recent exciting purchase of more Smithsonian fabrics later as I’m off to try and finish some borders of that Robyn Falloon quilt so that its ready to show her when I go to ‘The Farm’ next Sunday with Margaret.

Ciao

Jenn

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