Patriots & Petticoats is going Home

Before I show you the most amazingly beautiful quilt I finished this week, let me share some other rather surprising news. Somebody apparently nominated me for Best Longarm Quilter over on SewCalGal's 2012 Golden Quilter Awards. I am amongst a strong field of talented quilters. From now until the end of March, the above link will take you to where you can vote for best fabric store, best teacher, best longarmer, etc. If you want to make me smile (and I know you do!), put a vote in for me (Margaret). Many of you probably only know me from what I show here for quilting, but I assure you, I am just one of those not yet know :-)

And now to Lynette's Patriots and Petticoats.

Stats...98" square. It has wool batting, and is stitched with 3 colors of Superior's Omni thread. This is their newest thread, and is a 40wt polyester. It has a dull appearance, like a cotton, and seemed appropriate for a quilt that would have been quilted with cotton thread 170 years ago. My hallway prohibits me from showing the entire quilt, but one of my previous posts gives a link to the entire quilt. This is a nice layout for this style of "scrap" quilt, as all 1840 reproduction quilts are. Some designs just don't leave much room for quilting or show cohesion between the many pieced blocks.

I chose to break up the center background slightly with an outlined square on point, with feathers inside of the band. The inner section is straight cross-hatched. It seems really simple, but it is so classic to this period, and lets the focus be on the center medallion.
The medallion is where I may have deviated from pure Civil War tradition a little. I kept plenty of feathers, but added a few swirls here and there (to fill those pesky points), and created tulips from the tulip piecings. Hopefully I will be forgiven for not quilting purely to the 1840 period. Another thing I did that is a little out of character for me, is the feathers are stitched in contrasting thread (sage on the cranberry). It limits the thread changes, and allows them to show creatively. I like it.
The borders have single scallops, piano keys and a feather filling. Simple (well, comparatively!) and effective. The ribbon border is accentuated with straight lines and feather back-filling.
The logs were only supposed to be outlined, but I made a couple wrong turns on the first set, and ended up cross-hatching all of them in the end. It looks just fine; no regrets. Everywhere else has lovely curving feathers and curved-crosshatching. Yum.
It's amazing how much better the quilting shows on this quilt than it did on the previous repro quilt I did - mostly because the color is so much lighter. Each of 16 pieced blocks were stitched with a feathered wreath. I did not want to do each differently. I don't think that is as effective (or representative of CW quilts). When I saw the back, I knew that this was the right choice.
One last look at the front...
The backing is pretty. I like when backs show the lovely texture. Those feathered wreaths just rotate so serenely!
And the scalloped border is so pretty from the back.
I've got several simpler (mostly E2E) quilts to fill my time for the next 3 weeks. I am so psyched about getting out of here to go to MQX - Will April 10th just get here??!