Jan's Star Sampler

This was a new client, Jan, but I felt like we were old friends. Her sister-in-law, Linda, has been a long-time client of mine, and when Jan came to drop off her quilt, we just chatted and visited about quilting and husbands and cooking with wild game - just like good pals.

This special quilt was a big project for Jan, and I was so honored that she entrusted it to me. She let me pretty much have my way with it. I gave her some initial thoughts about what I could see, quilting-wise, and she just smiled and agreed with everything I said. My kinda client! Ha!

As it ended up, the quilt kinda had its way with ME! There were 21 different star blocks on this quilt, and not one of them was the same, in both piecing and quilting, although I did incorporate mostly the same shapes (continuous curve, serpentine, etc.) in each star, to make them cohesive. There were also several areas of beautiful appliqué. I echoed around the appliqué and then densely filled around them. I gave the wide outer border a simple piano-key treatment, and then swirls and ribbon candy on the two narrower inner borders. Some secondary shapes in the setting triangles around the perimeter, and geometric dot-to-dot quilting in the large half-square-triangles throughout the quilt.

I had some moderately wide variation of quilting density on this piece. Areas with less quilting puff up more, and I used this in key places, to feature certain dominant shapes throughout the quilt. Areas that I thought needed to recede from the spotlight got more dense quilting.

All quilting is free-motion, hand-guided on a longarm quilting machine.