“They look like aliens,” said my husband, when he saw this photo, blown up to poster size. It’s a very close-up view of Antelope Horns milkweed, one of the coolest flowers I love.
We saw this particular plant on my parents’ place and I believe my daughter Ella snapped this picture with my phone. The five-petal flowerets are about half an inch across in real life, which makes their fantastic detail hard to see very well. I cropped the photo and had it printed as two 2 x 3-foot posters.
One poster was my pattern for cutting out the leaves and petals. I numbered each flower, leaf, and background piece on the poster and on a black-and-white printout before cutting.
I cut each flower into individual petals. I left the white and purple bits in place, planning to applique those onto the surface later. At this point, the important thing was to make a solidly-covered quilt top.
Before all this numbering and cutting business, I knitted the fabric for the Antelope Horns wall hanging on the Ultimate Sweater Machine. The knitting took about three hours, even with all the color and yarn changes (they are easy on the USM). I steam blocked the fabric and then stabilized it with fusible interfacing. The interfacing stops the stitches from unraveling when I cut the fabric. Also machine-sewing the patches is a lot easier when they are stabilized.
After all the individual petals were cut out, I pinned them to my knitted, stabilized fabric. I tried to line up the petals from one flower, so that they would mostly have the same striations in the knitted fabric. Time to cut out again.
Okay, here are the pieces of the poster with knitting pinned underneath. The next step is to piece them all back together.