October was red poppy month in my studio! I’ve been on a break over much of the summer of 2021 from quilting but I’m back at work and trying some new techniques. I created two tall and narrow poppy quilts shown hanging together, each with three flowers and two buds. Each quilt is 18″ W x 33″H so hung together with 2″ between them the composite quilt is 33″H x 38″W. The second quilt I created is a Field of Red Poppies which involved some careful sequential piecing, more on that in a minute. Both quilts used a combination of traditional piecing for the background and stems followed by raw edge applique for the flowers and buds. Both were pieced on the machine and also quilted on my residential Bernina sewing machine.
The Field of Red Poppies was lots of fun to figure out the traditional piecing part. 
I sewed the lower green sections together and then added the lower very pale blue, almost white sky piece. Then I spent a few hours cutting in/piecing the stems of the nine flowers and five buds in a random and creative way to simulate flowers in a field. I finished the background piecing by adding the mottled blue fabric for the middle and upper sky. Finally, the nine flowers and five buds were sewn on and the entire quilt was quilted.
Each poppy flower has 3-4 petal pieces creatively designed to resemble poppy flowers. The buds were traditionally pieced and then raw edge appliqued with my sewing machine.
Combining these two piecing techniques allowed for more detailed design in the final quilts.