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The most dominant colours of Australian wildflowers are red, orange and yellow. Plant breeders have not produced much variety by adding pretty pastels to the colour range, but I thought I would try breeding some fabric variations.

The shapes of Aussie flora in pastel colours are very pretty, but would not look so good covered in dust!

Pale and pretty!

The colours in these designs are more like an English country garden than the colours found in much of the Australian bush.

The shapes are based on Australian native flowers, but the colours have been softened to pretty pastels. A lot of our native flora are bright red, orange and yellow and often have very dark green or rather grey foliage, but there are some with pretty colour variations in contrast to the bright strong colours.

First design in a new project file, experimenting with layouts based on pieced block designs. Using applique blocks is interesting because square designs placed in a rectangular are distorted, which sometimes works well, other times not so well.

A different layout from a different pieced block design which I think might be interesting to keep playing with, though I do have another couple of pieced blocks picked out to use in this project.

Then will have to add some quilting!

In Electric Quilt 8 we can use Pieced Block Designs as quilt layouts, providing only straight lines forming squares and rectangles are used.

The blocks above are the blocks I have chosen from my collection to use with applique block designs in a project Outback Banksias.

When the block is used as quilt layout the blocks can be drafted to fit the size and shape of the block, but I find that adding teh same block everywhere in the setting is the easiest way to have my first look at what happens when square blocks are used in rectangles.

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Pretty pastels in a very traditional style quilt … not the natural colour of Aussie flora, but some of our flowers fade in the sun, just like our fabrics, especially those which hang in windows!

I like the second design.

Only the shapes of the flowers really look like Aussie Bush flowers … I have used faded colours instead of the bright reds and yellows of many of the well known Australian native flowers.

Changed swags in both the swag borders, and the flowers in one, and made some of the flowers fade even more. I wonder if plant breeders are trying to create new varieties of our flowers.