Challenge 2017 - #20, Giant Star

Whew. I've made it to 20 quilts finished this year. But I'm more than halfway through the year and the challenge is to finish 52 quilts! One each week. I'm not doing as well as I had hoped, but have more quilts ready to tell you about.

Let me tell you about this giant star quilt.

I've seen pictures on line of this giant star quilt a few times and thought this would be a simple quilt to work on. I pulled some FQ of batiks and went to work.

I found this tutorial by Jenny Baker. I cut 10" squares and ended with 9" finished HST rather than the larger ones Jenny used. I had the half square triangles sewn quickly and put up on my design wall where they sat and sat and sat!

I finally sewed the blocks together and added a narrow inner border in the background fabric to make the star float. I cut the rest of the FQ into 6" strips and sewed them together for the border. This quilt finishes at 50" square.

I started quilting this earlier in the year when I first got my Handi Quilter Pro-Stitcher and wanted to practice a few things. I stitched in the ditch around the star points. I choose a large loop design and made it even larger and cropped around the star points. I did OK with these. AND then I did a dumb thing! I decided to do some dense stitching in the background to "really show off the loops". This took forever!

I created a pantograph using the loops design for the border and echoed and stitched piano keys on both sides.

I stitched feathers in the stars.

I stitched straight lines in the background of the stars.....but my advice is to not leave this step and come back and not remember what direction you are sewing in!

The straight lines should all be going into the points, not changing direction! Sheesh! I think this amount of detail was a mistake. Partly because the fabrics are so 'loud'. The feathers don't really show and I lost interest and ended up taking the quilt off the frame for a while.