Sunday, November 27, 2011

Stars & Cables

First off, because our second favorite thing to read about on a quilt blog is food, here's the well-asked for recipe for the chocolate bourbon pecan pie I made for Turkey Day. Trust me, it's not for those of you counting calories, but it is so yummy.

I finished this quilt up earlier last week for a client. It's rather small, 43"x55". Bette accuracy would have come from paper piecing the stars, but she chose not to. From afar, the accuracy is somewhat of a mute point, as it is not really evident. But, she gave me a picture of how someone else had quilted it with large sweeping curves, and I found thisextremely difficult to implement neatly when star points were not always where they should have been.
Never the less, she was very happy with the end result. It is being made for her son, who is chairing a PTA raffle for a school out in Kansas. I used a second layer of a poly batt to give additional poof. I must stop buying these from Joann, however, because this Mountain Mist batting is just abismal. For all you quilters that love things on your quilts to "pop", invest in wool or use Hobbs polydown. The suff at Joann's is just plain disappointing. Cheap, yes. Not great though.

As the closeup show, the stars didn't puff nearly as much as I wanted. I used a cotton batting that the client brought as the bottom layer (and Warm & Natural is just too thin for my taste too). I quilted 2 different fillers in the sky background, and randomly chose a dozen or so stars to do microquilting on to highlight them (using the gold Glide thread). The effect of the gold was very evident on the back...

(and you can see the second filler that I used too) - line that follow the curves through the stars. Now, as a batting comparison, here's a picture of where I am on my quilt, which has a layer of Hobbs 80/20 and a layer of Legacy wool. Notice how the cable motifs pop. There's no saggy look there. Use of good batting most definitely does make a difference. Don't sacrifice here because you think it is on the inside of the quilt and won't matter. It most certainly does.
My cables are free-handed, and hence some of the longer lines are not as straight as I'd hoped for. I'll decide after this is off the machine if I need to pick out and straighten some of them. It's got pretty nice texture though :-)

5 comments:

Marie-José H said...

I love your quilting skills. This one is again so beautiful. It is a joy to look at it.

Marie-José H said...

I love your quilting skills. This one is again so beautiful. It is a joy to look at it.

Linda said...

Gorgeous!! I think your cables look great. You probably already know this or don't need another ruler, but Deloa Jones has a new ruler for cables. I saw it on her site. One for the cables and one for taking the cable around corners. I know...quilters are total codependents when it comes to gadgets. :-)

Desley said...

Your customer's star quilt is very pretty even if you weren't entirely happy with the batting. Your quilt is coming along beautifully.

Tatkis said...

Such a beautiful star quilt!
All the stitches are perfect!

Hugs,
Tatyana