Hey Everyone, welcome back to Colourful Friday.

I know you have all been waiting with baited breath to see my first tissue box art piece and there it is at the top of the page. I thought I would wait for Easter to reveal it as the colours I have used remind me of Easter. They are fresh and crisp just like spring and yes it is now spring although you would never know it where I live as a winter storm has hit.

I guess winter has to have one last hurrah which I suppose is fine as I do need to stay in and get a piece finished and quilted for my week of blog posts at QuiltSocial next month.

The Inspiration

The piece took inspiration from these two tissue boxes.

The first being a Puffs box of lime green with white dandelion type flowers on it. Hence the name Dandelion Puffs.

The Puffs tissue box

The second being this Kleenex box of gradated white, turquoise and lime green.

Kleenex box in gradated colours

The Fabrics

I decided to stay close to the colours of the tissue boxes seeing how they work well together; the lime green and turquoise. The new growth of green in spring often has that lime green hue. And besides, I had the perfect fabrics to use in these colours.

After playing around with many of these perfect fabrics from my stash I chose these 5 fabrics with lots of texture to create the background.

The fabrics

The Design

To begin I drew out a faux Bargello on a piece of paper for the background. Numbering everything and writing the measurements on each piece helped to keep everything where it should be and ensure I cut the right size pieces. I wanted some movement in the background and by creating a faux Bargello I was also hoping to create depth.

The graphic design

As I cut the pieces I placed them in order on my portable design wall starting with the bottom 3 layers of green.

The green pieces

The top two turquoise layers were added next to complete the background.

The top turquoise pieces added

As you all know things can get out of place no matter how hard you try to keep everything in order when sewing so I figured I had better label each piece just so I wouldn’t have to do any reverse sewing. I had no little sticky labels left so I used pieces of masking tape – not one of my better choices as they ended up sticking really good after the iron got to them leaving a slight gummy residue on the fabric when I finally got them scraped off.

Masking tape labels

Now that the background is sewn together I can move onto quilting it.

All sewn together

Well, I’m all set to quilt the piece but first I have to figure out how. On that note I’ll go and take a look at my quilting books and see you soon for the next installment of Dandelion Puffs – A Tissue Box Art Quilt.

Happy Quilting!