Blogger's Quilt Festival - Starburst Revealed

Edit (August 2011): This quilt is currently for sale in my Etsy shop.

I have decided to reveal one of the quilts I've entered in the South Australian Quilt Guild's Festival of Quilts, which will be at the Craft and Quilt Fair from November 5-8. I finally joined the Guild last year, and this is one of my first entries. I had both entries valued last week, and was thrilled with the results.
Starburst came out of the Palm block. As shown here, I modified the original, which has 14 pieces, to make it much more complicated, and my version has 38 pieces!

I'd intended to make the quilt for a friend's baby, but the effort involved changed my ideas. Just removing the foundations from each and every block, with all the fiddly, narrow points, took about 25 minutes - yes each, and there are 16 of them. (Then I reasearched water soluble foundation sheets, and ordered in a large supply for 'next time'!) Each block is 9in (prior to the heavy quilting; they shrunk to about 8 5/8in) and the finished quilt is 50in square. The unit below is 4 blocks combined:

It took ages to quilt in the ditch around all the coloured parts - then even longer to do the Emmaing (McTavishing, see the link on the right for more information about this style of quilting) because I had my new machine on the 'wrong' FMQ setting, and the thread kept breaking.

I used almost entirely scraps for the brights, but did dip into my stash where I needed a certain colour for balance, especially for the larger pieces.

I stocked-up on lots of this gorgeous rainbow stripe, and it was perfect for part of the border.

Emmaing around all those points was awkward, but in the plain border is where it really sings.

This shows some of the quilting texture across the quilt:

And from the back:

Thanks for coming, especially those of you who are new to my blog. I'd love to hear from you, and will try to visit your blogs as well. Have a look around, I hope you'll be back! I've just gone through the long process of making the lists of my quilts on the right into links, so it should easy if you want to look at them.

Now pop over to Amy's blog and check out the other quilts in this Blogger's Quilt Festival. Be warned - it'll take a while!

I'll be having a giveaway here next weekend.