Update on the Star and Leaf Quilt November 2018

I thought I'd post an update on my Star and Leaf quilt today.  It seems as if I have been working on this quilt forever.  The quilt is a king size quilt.  Piecing the quilt went fairly quickly.  Quilting the quilt is another story entirely.

I found the pattern for this quilt in a quilting magazine.  I think it was actually listed as a quick quilt.  It probably was if you machine pieced it and machine quilted it.  Or as many people do these days, send the quilt out to be quilted.  I hand quilt.  That takes a lot longer.  I prefer the look of hand work to machine work.

I also feel that hand quilting gives me more bang for my buck.  Material used to be fairly inexpensive, but that is no longer the case.  The price of cotton has risen considerably over the years and that has affected the cost of fabric.  Purchasing cotton fabric for quilting is now a much more expensive proposition.  If I hand quilt, the project takes longer, thereby stretching the entertainment and engagement value I get from a quilt.  I know that this is a seems perverse to many quilters who can't wait to get onto the next project, but I enjoy spending the time on each one rather than always thinking about what's next.  The next project will come around soon enough.

The project is not quilted as the project in the magazine was.  I wanted to make my quilt unique rather than looking like something that is already out there.  I thought that I would continue the leaf motif in the quilting.  Each square that has a large leaf is quilted with small leaves all around the large leaf.  I wanted it to have a background effect of there being more leaves on the ground.  Along with the leaves, I also quilted in some spirals.  I always enjoy watching the swirling of the leaves as they spiral to the ground.  It would not have been hard to quilt the seed shape, but it had been that way in the magazine, and I wanted something different.  Unfortunately, it is very hard to see the quilting in this picture.  Perhaps if you click on it to enlarge it the quilting will be more visible.

The back of the quilt.

The stars are quilted quilted with lines to look like rays of light coming from them.  I wanted the stars to be fairly energetic.  They were not that hard to quilt, but I went through four air erase marking pens in the course of the project. I wanted the lines to be straight so I used a ruler to mark them.

The inner border has been embroidered in spiky lines that mimic the shape of the triangles in the sun.    I started out with a more elaborate pattern in this border, but marking it proved too difficult.   My pattern for the border was so small that even the fine line erasable marking pen was too tight to use.  Rather than enlarging and hand cutting the pattern (I don't have one of those die cut machines.), I decided that it was time to keep it simple and go with something I could easily mark on the border.

The outer border is the last thing that needs to be embroidered before I bind the quilt and call it finished.  I am thinking about quilting it with some sort of double helix pattern.  Other times I think about getting ambitious and making a star pattern to echo the start in the quilt.  I guess it depends on how much trouble it will be to disperse the stars evenly across the quilt. 

The holidays are rapidly approaching.  I need to start working on some gifts.  I will blog about them next Sunday.