Civil War Chronicles Quilt

I just finished the Civil War Chronicles Quilt (designed by Homestead Hearth) this past weekend. It is completely huge - around 112" square or so (see quilt here), and is made with marcus fabrics. I can't begin to take a picture of the entire quilt so you'll have to look at it in the link. I'm by no means a huge fan of the reproduction fabrics from any era, but these were particularly difficult to quilt on because they are very heavily patterned. I wondered when the quilt was done if my intended quilting scheme would actually show! Here's the quilt on my raised queen bed, nearly draping all the way to the floor (over my 100" square quilt!).The center of the quilt...Lots of ditch quilting, curved cross hatching, cc, and feathers where I hoped that they might show. Under the right lighting, they do.
I really think that this design is disjointed, discombobulated and ill-conceived. It uses fabrics for a few blocks and then never uses them again on the entire quilt. There are probably 25 different fabrics. There are several different block designs - some 6 patch, some 4-patch, etc. That made designing a continuous design challenging. After some thought and many hours of quilting, I still wonder if an edge-to-edge may have been a better route. Hate when those moments of uncertainty come after 2 weeks of non-stop quilting (and the client really did want a "custom"). These gripes, mind you, are directed back at the designer of this top and not the piecer. She did a nice job with such a large quilt at keeping most points and creating a flat and easily quiltable top. She's probably really looking forward to 440" of binding...teehee

There are 16 of these small-ish (~6-8") blocks around the outer flanks of the quilt, eight of each block. I was happy to discover that despite the blocks being different, it was rather simple to devise a reasonably simple stitch pattern that was the same and worked for both block designs.
This quilt has a nice Hobbs wool batting so over quilting was not desired. Besides, I wanted to keep it somewhat "period", and avoid things like pebbles and meander stippling, etc.

The monstrous borders are what is shown below. I like the feathered triangles, and think that they work well. Any areas that had minimal piecing had quilting more tailored to show, such as feathering.

The four corners of the quilt are comprised each of 4-13.5" (yea, my eyes rolled also) blocks. As I said earlier, each of these has a different construction geometry. To keep the cost more manageable, we opted to do a E2E filler in these 16 corner blocks. I think this was a good decision. I wanted to do Baptist fans really bad, but I do these with templates and they just do not fall into E2E pricing. Instead, I subdivided each block into quadrants and did free feathers down the diagonals.

This shows more evidently on the back. It creates a nice texture, and is not out of context with the genre of the quilt.

For those curious, I used Superior's So Fine thread on the top and Bottomline on the bottom...4300 yards to be exact.

I am onto another reproduction quilt; started it today. It is Patriots in Petticoats. It's a very lovely design and I am having fun with this quilt already. It's a little brighter than this one in this post, and has more open fabric where I can quilt. Posts later this week...