Heliconia is here!

Way back in 2006, my husband and I* took a trip to St. Lucia, where we were absolutely wowed by the island’s natural beauty: white sand beaches and clear waters, towering mountains, and lush tropical flora. It was here that I first saw Heliconia plants growing in the wild.

28-year old Jenn, reaching up towards a towering Heliconia flower, surrounded by varied green foliage.

Y’all, that picture was taken July 6, 2006 - exactly 17 years ago today! I’d like to have a moment of silence in honor of that smooth forehead and not-at-all-grey hair.

Ahem. Thanks.

Flash forward >>> today, serendipitously, the Heliconia quilt pattern is launching! The PDF includes instructions for making four different sizes:

Heliconia combines two techniques that might be new to a beginning quilter - strip piecing and curved piecing. Don’t worry, though - I provide tips, detailed instructions, and diagrams, and one of my testers who had never sewn curves before had great success!

If you’re new to curves and on the fence (or thinking, “no way, I can’t sew curves!”), maybe tester Vicki (@piecetymes) can convince you:

Best of all, no points or seams to match. Simple. A foolproof and forgiving design. Even if leaf and petal blocks end up with wonky sizes, it doesn’t matter because the offsets between columns and the long vertical spacers between the columns mean that the block seams are never forced to match. The background hides a multitude of mismatches, especially between the petal and leaf blocks. A little gap just disappears.

In fact, if you look at the close-ups of my cover quilt, you’ll see that some petals are right up next to each other and some aren’t! I personally embrace these little deviations: they’re proof that real live human hands made the quilt, but you really don’t notice them unless you’re looking for them.

Speaking of that cover quilt…

I used Kona solids in Cerise (A below), Goldfish (B), Bright Idea (C), Gecko (D), and Honeydew (E). Heliconia is available on QuiltInk for you to digitally play around with different color solids (I hear prints are coming soon!). I’ve also mocked up a few fun ideas over on Instagram using Libs Elliott fabrics - her bold Phosphor solids and Atomic blenders would be amazing here - and I think a version using RSS Speckled would be gorgeous too!

Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post featuring the beautiful versions of Heliconia created by my talented testers!

*technically, Oscar was with us, too - we discovered l was pregnant with him right after booking the trip! 💙