Feeling great with Lone Star

Hi there!

I'm feeling pretty good about myself tonight. Over the weekend, I had an awesome quilt finish and gifting that quilt was wonderful and very special; one of the best I've had yet! I'm still putting my post together about it, however, because I'm saving it for Blogger's Quilt Festival that starts this weekend!

But I will let you see what I finished tonight:

The quilting on my Little Lone Star.

I was trying to get the lighting better; that didn't work out very well. I seriously need a design wall.

Anyhoo, this will end up being a wall hanging. It's about 20" square. I love the Patriotic-colored variegated thread: it's King Tut by Superior, called Americana #919. It just makes the star sparkle like fireworks in the night sky!

I've wanted to do my own star with the curved wine-glass quilting inside the diamonds, like I see at a lot of shows. It turned out quite well this time! In the blue backgrounds, squares and triangles, I used a combination Diamond and Lattice design that I put together from taking Angela Walter's' Craftsy class: "Dot-To-Dot Quilting". Again, I was going for the radiating light rays from the star.

This star resulted from trying to enlarge the star from 6" to 12" from my Sylvia's Bridal Sampler quilt....I thought doubling the strip widths for the strip piecing would work, but it didn't. It resulted in approximately an 18" star, not a 12" star. And then I didn't know what size to cut the background triangles and squares! I had to take it to my Quilt-Pro on the computer, pull the star from the Block Library, and tell it what size I wanted for a 18" star so that I could finish this one. The triangles Quilt-Pro told me to cut were too big, so once I set them into the star, I trimmed the whole block.

It was great practice to get the technique down, with strip-piecing, and cutting 45 degree angles. And this block was great to practice quilting, and to test out the thread, to see if I liked the variegated thread for the whole Sylvia's Bridal Sampler quilt.

Then I turned back to the Quilt-Pro and used the cutting chart for the 12" block that it provided. And that worked out just like it needed to; that block is waiting in the stack with the rest of the blocks.

I think it looks great. And now I'll go to bed. Baby has his 9-month checkup tomorrow with vaccines. Oh joy. (How in the heck did 9 months just go by since he was born?!!!!!)