Puakenikeni Baby Quilt

I made this little pink baby quilt to have on hand for baby emergencies. I'm feeling very proud of myself for making this one in advance. Now all I have to do is make a blue one and I'm all set for any non-multiple baby scenario. I feel so prepared!

This is a puakenikeni flower, the inspiration for my quilt:

It smells heavenly! "Puakenikeni" means "ten cent flower" because the locals used to sell them by the roadside for ten cents a piece. I'm told that was quite expensive at the time; I suppose the flower was rarer back then. This flower makes beautiful fragrant leis.

At the time I made my quilt, I thought the puakenikeni flower had only four petals, but as you can see, it has five. Ah well, babies can't count, thank goodness. I did look up other names of flowers that have four petals, but "Epilobium Angustifolium" didn't quite have the same ring to it. So Puakenikeni it is.

Let's get closer:

This quilt was very difficult to get a picture of. It's much softer in color than these pictures indicate, but I had to turn up the contrast for you to be able to see it! Cameras are fussy about quilts.
Here's a close-up of one of the blocks. Looking at this now, I can see where some of my seams on this block didn't exactly line up, but that's okay. Babies can't count OR see very well. She will love it anyway. I hope she loves it to shreds.

This little quilt would be honored to be someone's dear blankie.

The reverse, showing my leafy vine doodle. This picture is closer to the true color.

The flower block itself is made up of four traditional "Snowball" blocks. You just have to change the color of one of the corners and sew them together like this:

I used the following method so I didn't have to cut triangles: I cut a large white square and laid little squares on each corner right side down, then sewed diagonally as I have indicated in red. Trim seam, flip triangles, and press.

This is a very easy block to make and you can make it any size you want! For a 8" finished block, start with four 4 1/2 " cut white squares. (Mine is a 6" finished block--I started with four 3 1/2" squares.) Different sizes of little squares make different shapes of petals, so that's something to experiment with. 1 1/2" cut little colored squares is a good size to start with on a 4 1/2" white square.