Starflower: Part II

After finishing the piecing and marking, I loaded my quilt top onto my mom's old voyager so I could quilt it.  I did a pattern of free-motion vines with leaves and flowers in the background of the star; since the print is so busy you can't really see the quilting at all.  I spent more time working on the quilting in the setting blocks; I was hopeful that it would stand out really nicely like it did on One Hen, Two Ducks.  Unfortunately, the contrast between the blue fabric and the thread in this quilt wasn't as high as the contrast between the black fabric and the thread in the previous one so it doesn't show up quite as well.  Also, I used a fairly lightweight thread. It's all Isacord which is great thread on the longarm, but it's only 40 wt so with large areas of not-too-dense quilting, you don't see it quite as well as I'd like.  The yellow quilting with the orange sunbursts goes all the way around the quilt as does the white candy striping.  I find when I'm quilting that I go back to the same patterns over and over again; I really need to branch out.

Just ignore the little quilting mistakes and knots; I'm trying to get better about those.  You can kind of see the purplish tinge in the blue setting squares in these pictures.  I really did love that fabric.

Here's the final quilt.  It's really big, big enough to hang over all four sides of my king bed by about 8 inches.  There were instructions for drafting the pattern pieces for each bed size, but I used the same pattern pieces my mom used, and apparently she and my sister had some sort of miscommunication during the measuring stages.  Apparently some measurement was 3.14, and one of them said, "you know, like pi" which prompted a little dyslexia and the cutting of a pattern piece based on 3.41 instead.  It made for some laughs since we're all actually fairly mathy people, but the net result was a couple of very large quilts.  Sadly, it means I don't actually have a picture of the whole thing, this picture was taken at the quilt show in Dallas and the top fifteen  inches or so are flipped over the hanging pole.  The borders do actually go around all four sides.

Starflower, 101" x 101", 2011

I love having it in our bedroom, it makes me happy every time I walk in there.  I find the colors very soothing.

Here's the label I made for it, from a picture I took on a trip to Eureka Springs last fall.  Sorry it's so hard to read.