Blogger's Quilt Festival

Today's post is for the fall Blogger's Quilt Festival.  This an awesome online display of quilts brought to us by Amy (since if we are here browsing these, we aren't in Houston with all of quilting's lucky elite!).  We get to stay home and await Hurricane Sandy in the coming days.

My quilt is entitled Zen Garden.  This was finished this past winter.  I'll confess right off the bat to being a longarm quilter, and one the loves to make quilts for shows.  This was my 4th such quilt.  It had the pleasure of hanging in 4 or 5 shows this past season, bringing home a few ribbons.  Similarly, it's even made it into Quilter's Newsletter magazine.  But, enough with the boring stuff, you came here to see pictures.  Am I right?...

 

This quilt finishes at 65" square.  It's a traditional pattern called a broken star or Carpenter's star.  The applique all around the border almost disguises this.  It's deceptively easy to construct because the diamonds constructed of 25 pieces are actually made from strip sets.  The trick is just getting all the fabrics of the strips in the right order!  

One of the things I limited myself to when I made this quilt was to ONLY use fabrics from my stash.  So, there goes the possibility of this looking too traditional.  I have quite a bit of bolder color, larger print fabrics, and despite the size of these pieces being fairly small, they all seemed to work nicely at creating a visual colorburst effect.  

 

The majority of the quilt is the fabric used on the outer border and inner setting squares.  I knew since this was a Kona fabric (solids, though nice, are kind of dull and boring and they don't bring a lot of life to the party), I would need to make it interesting somehow.  As you can see, the setting squares were jazzed up by appliqueing a purple and pink flower to the inner corner, and then more applique.  The tan is just dull by itself.  The border around the star received a lot of Asian-inspired floral applique.  I love working with the bias strips, and the curvy-ness of this distracts the eye from the bland tan.  I was able to use flowers that are basically constructed from the same shape as the star is, and then brought many of the same green prints back in for leaves -- all 85 of so of them.   And I can't forget the butterflies.  They are my personal favorite.  A small feature that helps to define this as a garden.  I fussy cut them from a piece of fabric I had, then colored them with sharpie pens to make them the colors I wanted.

The part that I really love in the process, though, is when the quilting starts and the quilt is brought to life.  Design details can be added to the boring tan areas to make them visually stimulating, like the checkerboards shown above.  Rays were quilted into the inner star to bring it outwards.  I enjoy all the fun fillers that make the finished quilt an I-Spy of sorts.  Approximately 75 hours was spent on the quilting (did I mention that I am insane too??!)

 Here's a closeup of the edge...a small (yes, micro) micropiping gives the quilt interest, but also provides a little added stiffness to help it to hang straightly.

 Here's just a few more photos...

Thanks to Bonnie Hunter.  I posted 4 of the ones that she sent me after MQX.  And what fun would it be without one of the back?...  The backing fabric is a Laura Ashley print.  It shows the texture, but not all the stitching lines.  And that's my artistic muse, Picasso, eyeing the binding clips as potential toys!.

I love all your comments, and I hope that you have a great week looking at the Bloggers Quilt Festival quilts.

Stats...
size 65"x65"
techniques: machine pieced, hand appliqued
quilted by me on a longarm
Categories: wall quilt, professionally quilted, applique quilt