Monterrey Medallion

Erin makes some of the prettiest quilt, and this one is just no exception.  It is called Monterrey Medallion, and measures about 72x90".  The colors are soothing, and the piecing is so nice and flat. She asked for a custom.  This is the last of the quilt tops she sent me back in the early spring...Yea Me!! Love when I actually get to the bottom :-)...especially since she has sent another one already too!

I knew I wanted to do mostly a filler around the smaller stars to conserve the budget a little.  It is so easy to let the time get away from you when  you are custom quilting when there are a zillion little designs here and there.  Because she tends to press seams open, I limited the ditching to hardly at all, and chose designs that diverted the eye from the lack of ditching.  With stars, my first inclination is that every point must be outline stitched to preserve the crispness, but not always is true.

 This has a single layer of Hobbs 80/20 batting.  Because the showier quilting is in white, I knew that it would show just fine, negating the need for the expense of a wool batt.  I used 2 colors of thread - white Glide and a tan-ish YLI polished poly.  The two rings of feathers in the above photo are actually stitched in the tan, so they show more.

The center medallion shows really beautifully.  It has multiple frames, some cross-hatching and plenty of feathers on the star.  The log cabin blocks are a little different - an attempt to give nice texture w/o needing to ditch.  Believe it or not, these squiggly lines are quite time consuming, more so than I thought.  It does look great though.

 The outer border brings life to what is otherwise fairly simple piecing.  That is one thing that I love about quilting.  You can quilt this as squares and a white chain, and be bored to tears, or just ignore the lines and create your own playground.  I like to play...There is a fun cross-hatched and feathered inner border, with more of the squiggly lines along the outside.  It ties the outer border to the rest of the quilt beautifully.  At the very end, when I was at that "I'm done!" stage, I took one last hour and put pearls along the white squares to set them off.

 Here's a couple more looks...

 and here...

Time to get to business now and figure out what is next.  Happy Sunday~