Oakshotts in my Garden

My little bundle of Ruby Red Oakshott cottons have grown into beautiful flowers in my garden....!

These oakshott cottons were magnificent to use. They are so soft and yet thicker than most shot cottons I have used in the past, giving them good body and making them very easy to use for these layered flower applique shapes.

My flowers have been made using iron on fusible webbing. The beauty of the oakshott is that it doesn't matter which side you iron the webbing onto, it is a hand woven cotton not printed, so the shimmering colours are the same on both sides.

Each oakshott is made with two colours, one on the warp, one on the weft which is why these cottons sparkle and catch the eye. You should have seen the girls ooh and ahh over my little bundle when I took them to stitch night!

The background I have laid my flowers on is strips of various low colour fabrics, cut on a slightly crooked angle. The stripe and the gorgeous yellow Kaffe fabric in the pic below were too bright for the rest of the fabrics, so I turned them over and used the back of these fabrics on the front of the quilt. That worked well to tone them down to the other lighter fabrics.

Can you spot them in this pic?

I'm thinking of making up a little tute to show how I drew these flowers and adhered them to the quilt. Would anyone be interested in that?

A huge thank you to Michael from Oakshott for sending me these Ruby Red beauties, and to Lynne (Lily's Quilts) for the opportunity to get creative with them. Now I'm eyeing off a couple more bundles, especially the Tahiti and the Sunrise. If you would like more info about these beautiful Oakshott cottons, there is a lovely little video here that Julia has done, about the fabrics and how they came about. Now I'm going to have fun machine quilting around each of these flowers to raw edge applique the flowers in place.

Oh, and don't forget to leave a comment here to win my wordy, texty giveaway! It will close tomorrow evening. xo