Iris quilting wall hanging

This is the wall hanging I made featuring Maruscha Gaasenbeek's iris folding technique. The heart block is from her book "Iris quilting" (see my previous post).

Here is the story behind this quilt: I had tested my Big Shot machine as soon as it arrived, and cut some hearts out of a pretty fat quarter I had. Satisfied that the machine worked, I kept the heart cutouts near it, hoping to use them in a project.

When I read Maruscha's book and saw the Heart to Heart pattern, it was love at first sight... I turned the hearts I had cut into stars, top left and right, and placed others as flowers on tree branches.

How do you like the heart? Next time I will try staying with one color with different gradations to emphasize the iris concept. Everything was machine appliqued to the background. I used buttons for the center of the flowers on the border, and flowers from the brown fabric for the center of the hearts-turned-flowers. Love springs...

I have loops on the back for hanging (not shown). Oh, yes, almost forgot: notice the brown thin border around the center block. It is not a border per se. I folded a one-inch strip of brown fabric in half, wrong sides together, as if I were preparing the binding, and sewed it onto the beige background with a 1/8 inch seam, then sewed the rose border onto it.

As I quilted the rose border, I added hearts here in there...

Now is your turn. What have you been up to?