In July, 2012, my husband and I took a cruise around the Hawaiian Islands to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. While there, I found a beautiful batik fabric that is apparently only sold by a specific Hawaiian quilt shop, and I also fell in love with all of the lush flora there. After some experimenting at home, I found a photo online of the plumeria blossom and made it into templates for this quilt. I machine appliquéed the leaves and blossoms and machine quilted the finished piece, adding the piping that I like so much. The quilting has pebbles between the leaves to represent the earth where the plant grows, evolving into swirls further away to represent the water surrounding the islands. The border has a variation of those swirls.
Here is a detail of some of the quilting, and another of the flowers:
The quilt measures approximately 27″ square, and I finished it in April, 2013.