Stars of the Sea - Bloggers' Quilt Festival

Welcome to my corner of the Spring 2012 Bloggers' Quilt Festival, and thank you for coming to visit!

(double-click this or any other image for a closer look)

I've decided to share Stars of the Sea. This is one of my largest quilts (it's plenty large enough to hang down the sides of our king size bed), and one of my favourites.

I'd played with the design for a long time before I got around to making it, when it was commissioned for Australian Patchwork & Quilting, moving it rapidly my my priority list.

It was originally designed to be much smaller, but as I was sandwiching it, I came to the conclusion that it was a 'useless' size (too big for most walls, not right for a lap quilt, and the wrong size/shape for any bed) so I unpinned the sandwich and added several borders. It's now so large that I don't have any practical location for photographing it flat! I actually took it to my parents' house today and finally photographed it properly, although due to a comedy of errors, I didn't get to press it first.

As much as I love the stars, the borders became probably my favourite part, due to the quilting. Using a bowl and a Hera marker, I marked the scrolling feather spine and scallops, then quilted them all freehand. The centre quilting is less interesting; loops on the background, but interspersed with snowflakes (despite the name, I see this more as a snowy quilt than anything else).

The quilting is all done on a domestic sewing machine (the Pfaff QE 4.0 I had before upgrading to my current machine recently). The stars are quilted in silver, each with a different radiating pattern of swirly shapes.

I especially like the effect of using a cream in the stars on the white background. Both the cream and the white are snowflake prints.

The stars were foundation-pieced - the best way for an impatient piecer to get sharp points and accuracy!

This quilt is set aside to go on our bed one day - but with two inside dogs, I'll leave the other one on our bed for now!

Now, follow this link to the rest of the amazing quits and stories in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival, and consider entering one of your own quilts if you haven't already.