I saw a pattern in a magazine with just 1 big feathered star in the centre. It was from Patchwork and Quilting, the article was by Jackie Taylor from White Cottage Crafts.
Yes, I could do that. But I hate following patterns, I want to create my own quilts so I took the star as the centre, put it on point and played around with a few designs for the border. I decided to quilt it in 5 sections. I'd do the central square and the 4 corners, then piece them together. I had to work out where I was going to put the joins according to where I wanted to quilt.
The centre of my quilt is quilted with a celtic ring. I drew the pattern to fit then cut a card template.
The leaf design is from a pack of quilting designs, the heart is actually a leaf design from the same pack. I scaled up the design to fit the spaces. I used a light box and marked the leaf and heart leaf designs prior to sandwiching.
The wandering line with the spiral along the border is over the join so had to be done last. I marked it with a plastic stencil I had cut.
The 4 corners are quilted in the ditch (furrow!) by machine.
It took quite a bit of washing with lux flakes to remove the pencil marks. I hung it to dry on the radiator. The next morning it was nice and dry, but it had somehow picked up a spec of magenta pink dye powder from somewhere ( hmm, wonder where that came from....?) and there were a couple of Pink dyed patches. Well I went to work, couldn't do much all day!! Looked at it when I got home. Fortunately for me it was on a couple of strips in one of the corners where there was not any quilting ( other than in the ditch), and I had a bit of each of those fabrics left. I had to cut out the strips and replace. Once it was washed I hung it somewhere else - and when it was dry I gave it to my Mum.
"Oh, keep it and give it me for Christmas" she said.
"No", I said, "it's your responsibility now"!
Stunning quilt. I am totally impressed.
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