Another 60" Feathered Star

This 60" Feathered Star by Judy Neimeyer came off the machine last Friday.  The client (Ann) saw this quilt that I quilted back in the springtime, and wanted a clone of it.  This is Jeanette's quilt and I refuse to make a clone of someone's quilt that is a show quilt.  Somehow, that is just not right in my mind.  I explained it to Ann, and assured her I'd use some of the features she liked about the reference quilt, but would make this quilt different and her own.  It is destined for her husband's office.

 First off, the color scheme is completely different.  Being brown, I had to dig deep to find that creative juice.  My brain just does not think in browns!  Except for the outer border, most threads are not brown.  I used many different threads -- Superior Omni, Glide and Magnifico, with Madiera Monolon for the ditching.  I know that it must be challenging selecting fabrics for these complicated quilts.  I'd struggle too.  I think, however, that the design loses itself somewhat though because of all the star point backgrounds being so close in tone (all beige, except for one set of points).  To help this, I stitched the center point backgrounds with a gold thread - SoFine to be exact.  I wanted to try to get a slight tone to the background.  Not sure it really worked unless you are up close though.  The other backgrounds were shades of tan.

 Every one of these type quilts I quilt, seems to be destined for issues at the center.  The center just puckers.  Always.  I've come to believe it is a feature of the design, or of how the piecer needs to manipulate it (and all the bias edges) in order to get the center point to match.  As a result, I limited the quilting across this center point.  Hopefully, after Ann blocks the quilt, it will lay fine.

 The brown background has a similar quilting to the previous one I did.  I chose a peacock-colored Glide thread to stitch the cross-hatching and feathers.  I wanted to bring out the blue in the feathered points, as well as make the feathered ring more visible.  The background diddle-daddle with pebbles (for lack of real technical name!), is in a deep rust Magnifico.  It just disappears as texture, as desired.

The border is a close cousin to the previous quilt, but I simplified it this time because it was as total pain in the butt to do before, and I don't really know that it brought the bang for the buck either.  For a non-show quilt, this is pretty and functional.

 One feature that Ann requested was the circles.  I have stitched many of them into the design.

The battings she sent were different that what I used before, and I don't think had quite as much poof.  These are QD 70/30 and QD wool.  The 70/30 is a much flatter batt than my Hobbs 80/20.  The many small dots I quilted on the green feathers's background (same size dot), barely show on this quilt, but were very prominent before.  Drat!  Still pretty, but I generally prefer the Hobbs battings.

 Another look at the outer segment...and below at the border at the mid-point.

I hope Ann will love it.  It's a great looking man's quilt, and was fun to finish :-)  Off to UPS!