Lili's flowers finalized

Today I finally had the opportunity to brush out the chenille strips on the baby quilt I finished on Monday.  The flowers came out super pretty! Here are the close-up shots I took:

On this shot you can see how nicely the quilt puckered up after washing

As I was working I was listening to Sandi's podcast Quilt Cabana Corner (see side bar for link). I am catching up with her since I just started to listen to her yesterday. I was at an episode where She was reviewing the McCall's Quick Quilts June/July 2011 issue. On page 40 there's a quilt called Leahbelle's Garden which is exactly the quilt that inspired me to make this one. On top of everything Sandi was the one who designed it. Isn't it interesting? Life has it's own twists :) Just thought I'd share this.

I never thought it will take me several hours to brush out and fluff up these flowers. It came to me why so I'll share the reasons below. This was my first project using chenille strips. Even though I knew the method by seeing it on TV and watching it over and over again, there were some things that I never realized until now.

In case you never worked with chenille before here are some tips I've learned along the way:

1. When you make your chenille strips use plain fabric. I used a white printed fabric which had little cars printed all over and when I  tried to brush the petal edges I noticed that the prints did not want to fray as easily as the plain fabric.
2. When  you cut out the squares for the strips,  iron a same size of freezer paper on one of the squares and draw the diagonal lines on the paper instead of the fabric. Stitch over the lines and remover the freezer paper before cutting the strips apart.
3. When doing the quilting make sure you move the strips away from the darning foot so you don't stitch over the fabric strips.
4. Be prepared to have lots of  lint while brushing. I actually kept cleaning the brush very frequently and put the lint in a plastic container to keep them from blowing all over the place. In this thought it's good to do this part of the job before cleaning the house. I had  thread pieces in my hair and my clothing, not to mention the dining room and all the floors in the house .
5. Calculate on a longer time period to do the brushing part. Don't underestimate the process as I did. It took me close to 4  hours to get the few flowers done.

Hope these tips will be helpful for you and will make your job easier. Besides all of these things I'm really happy with the result how it came out. I totally like the chenille texture.

Finally, here are the pictures of the quilt front and back:

I pieced the back from the leftover fabrics