Falling Stars

Here's a quilt that has already flown home to it's owner.  I'm calling it Falling Stars, but it is a modern assembly of free-pieced stars.  The background is a ivory Kona or Bella solid.  Sorry, I know ivory from white, and a solid from a print, but I'm not really sure who the maker is.  To accentuate the quilting, which would otherwise look relatively flat, I added a layer of poly on top of the usual Hobbs 80/20 batting I routinely use.  It's stitched with two threads - ivory Master Quilter from Wonderfil, and a rusty colored Superior (40wt, poly - sorry, the name escapes me).  Her backing, though a really pretty piece of fabric, was a bit of a fly in the ointment.  I believe it is a Kaffe shot cotton.  It has a wonderful fine hand, and is tightly woven like batiks.  It caused a ton of thread breaks and skips though like other quilters have described of batiks.  Fortunately, I have never had issues with batiks.  So...enough blabbing, and on with the show (they should be large enough to double click and see better also).  Here's most of the whole quilt...

Through the quilting texture, I have attempted to create flow and movement, as though these stars are really falling.  The client wanted me to limit the feathers, and use lots of bubbles.  You know I hate to have the plug pulled on feathering because it moves a quilt so nicely.  I tried...there are some large feathers with swirls.

I did a relatively minimal treatment to the stars.  They are ditched and outlined again.  A few are outlined or partially outlined in the white to show them off.   I tried not to outline the entire star or all of the stars because that would be predictable.  This type of quilt is about being whimsical, in the moment, seemingly unplanned (if there is such a thing for me!).  There's a largish flow of bubbles down through the stars, and sections of swirls, curls, and "pods" as I call them.   I had to refer to my Sea Glass quilt a bunch of times for motivation and ideas.  It is much the same concept, and although I initially had trouble "letting go" of form & function and planning on Sea Glass, it all seemed to flow when I did.

Interspersed in the flow on the left side every so often are triangles.  I did the same thing on the other side, except I used 1" circles.  These are done with the template so they are all the same.

 I love how the thick bunches of pebbles show with the changes of texture.

 The back is one of those that sends fear into the longarmer...a solid contrasting color (knowing the bobbin thread would be white!) - not my favorite look, but it's modern and it's the client's choice.

This was a rush job.  It's going to hang in some show in TX in 2 weeks.  I suspect it's a modern quilt display for the Texas Quilt Show, but I'm not positive about that.  I will have to wait until the summer.  I believe that she will have it in a display of quilts that the Boston Modern Quilt Guild is displaying at a side venue to the Lowell Quilt Show.  I haven't yet heard from the owner of the quilt, but another member of the BMQG who saw it yesterday has already emailed me about quilting for her after seeing this.  That's success in my book!