Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Rainbow Lonestar

Here is one of my most recent client quilts.  I knew Kari from years ago when I hosted the Four Seasons Quilt Swap and the Spring Fling Round Robin.  It has been several years, though, since I have done or hosted a swap on account of longarming quilting.  Last week when my youngest two kids were at Nana's for 2 days, and my oldest had day camp, I dared to get it out and see if it could be done.  A better way to say that is "dare to see if I could be focused enough given that the weather was hot and beautiful to quilt 6 hours a day!".  I actually finished it up last weekend, but close enough.  I have a bunch of easier and smaller quilts for this summer, but this one still needed quilting, and I didn't want to leave it for September.
 Stats:
about 69" square, single layer Hobbs 80/20 batting.  Threads used include red Superior Omni and black Glide.  I remember Kari mentioning she thought she wanted some color on the massive black background.  I did not want to create this garish background that would compete with the star though.  I decided that the red was the dominant color, and went with it.  It has color, but it is still subtle.
These corners and setting triangles are large areas to fill.  I gave them a combination of feathers, cross-hatching (reminiscent of spider webbs, eh?...seemed appropriate with the butterflies) and a couple fillers.You all now how I love the look of cross-hatching!
The quilting in  body of the star was kept simpler mostly because these diamonds are relatively small, and details won't really show.  On the center (below), which has the butterflies, I outlined the butterflies and tacked down the center with a little star.  There's gobs of bulk at the center to do too much.
 It has wonderful texture, and a subtle coloring.
The red shows as an octagon.  Hopefully, Kari will like this when it sails her way in a couple weeks (she's on holiday).  Can't wait to see it finished and bound :-)

4 comments:

Vicki W said...

That bit of red on the black really makes it special, along with your generally spectacular quilting of course. :-D

Deborah said...

This is a beautiful quilt, I love the colors. Your quilting is amazing. I'm just now figuring out how to machine quilt and I can't even imagine getting to your skill levels.

http://www.pineysneedle.com/

regan said...

Amazing! I just can't get over how think this stuff up! Just the simple thought of putting pebbles in the red diamonds......genius! Totally makes it awesome! She's gonna be thrilled!

Lynette said...

I need to get braver with thread color - I really love the effect of the red octagon. Your work is always so inspirational. Nice handling of the center bulk, too.