Blogger's Quilt Festival 2013 - Flag quilt

I'm entering this year's finished flag quilt in Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival throw category. It could have gone in the scrappy category or maybe the group quilt one too, I suppose.

I've blogged about this quilt a few times. The first time I mentioned it, it was a six-year-old UFO. Four years later I finally finished it.

In 2003, at the AQS show in Nashville, my friends and I spotted a quilt hanging in the Opryland hotel hallway and decided to duplicate it. We bought the blue fabric at the show to use in each block for continuity. We planned to swap the 5-inch blocks each month using a variety of golds and reds from our stashes. We did swap for a few months, and then life got in the way.

I'd pull the project out from time to time and make some blocks. With the pieced stripes of the flag finishing at a half-inch, the block is a bit tricky to sew well. One reason the quilt languished. Eventually I got all the blocks done and added the sashing. Also half-inch finished strips with half-inch cornerstones.

Maggi Honeyman quilted the flags in a Baptist fan pattern on her long-arm machine, and I got the binding finished at the beginning of the year. Looking back this is the only non-baby quilt I've finished this year, but as we all know, good quilts take a lot of time!

Thank you, Amy, for hosting the festival again. You can check out all the categories and quilts here at Amy's Creative Side blog.

My Blogger's Quilt Festival Fall 2012 entry

Pointless Lone Star

Measurements: 86 x 86 inches

Special techniques: No set in seams. Now that's special! Strip piecing.

Quilted by: Maggi Honeyman of Texas

Best category: Bed quilt

Pattern: Shades of Grey by Sarah Fielke from the August/September 2011 Quilters Newsletter magazine. Pattern can also be found here at Sarah's website.

My husband asked me to make a quilt for the wedding of one of his friend's. I thought I'd use the couple's favorite colors as a starting point, and then I found out they were purple (him) and pink (her). Hmmmm. I happened to see the pattern for this in Quilter's Magazine. It looked like it could be a fast and simple quilt with only four really huge blocks (36 inches square) and no set in seams, and I'd substitute a plain border for the pieced one. 

I pulled some pink and purple prints, and used them to choose the fabrics for the blocks. The original pattern duplicated fabrics and placement, but I didn't have that kind of yardage in my stash, and I wanted a more scrappy look so I made each block different. I was able to use fat quarters for the two rounds of inner diamonds, although I had to piece a couple scraps together to make a couple of the diamonds. When I was selecting fabrics, I needed some math skills to figure out which ones I had enough of for each round of diamonds, and that dictated some of the fabric placement too. I used a wide variety of fabrics from batiks, wovens, plaids, stripes and dots to novelty fabrics.

When I finished the blocks, I decided I didn't like the prints I had planned for the borders so they went on the back, and I went to the quilt shop. The navy and teal print I found has a pattern of birds and hearts on it, perfect in color and motif for this wedding quilt.

Maggi Honeyman did a wonderful job on her longarm. The setting triangles, which needed to read solid to balance the busyness of the star fabrics and give the eye a place to rest, seemed a little too boring compared to the rest of the quilt. Maggi fixed that by quilting special designs in those spaces.    

This was a fairly easy pattern, but probably not a beginner one. Especially if you switch it up like I did and have to recalculate yardage. For tips on making these kinds of points match, check out this post.  

I wanted to share this because I like seeing different takes on the same pattern. Seeing a quilt done in different colors and fabrics can make you fall in love with a pattern you hadn't given a second glance at before.

A big thank you to Amy for hosting the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

My entry in Blogger's Quilt Festival

I'm sharing this quilt for Blogger's Quilt Festival because 1) it's finished except for the label, 2) I was able to get a picture of the whole thing between wind gusts yesterday and 3) I had lots of fun putting it together.

The pattern is Girlfriends Galore by Kathy Doughty from Material Obsession's first book.  I had bought a couple yards of Philip Jacob's print "Daffodils and Dogwood" around the same time I bought the Material Obsession book. I was planning on making a different pattern from the book, but these two insisted on meeting. The rest of the fabrics were pulled from my stash. I didn't have enough yardage of any one fabric so I used several fat quarters of similar colors to make up the yardage.

The different piecing sections made the quilt fun to work on. I get bored doing the same thing over and over. With this quilt there was the Lone Star center, a few set-in seams, then a triangle border, some four-patches and some half-square triangles.   

Maggi Honeyman of Texas did the machine quilting on this. I hope that you can see in the picture how great her quilting is. Each section is done differently to complement the piecing. Because I used a solid backing it looks like a whole cloth quilt. That makes it reversible and is why it doesn't have a label. I'm not sure what to do because it should be documented (I regret not putting labels on some of my earlier quilts), but I want to be able to use it with either side showing. Suggestions appreciated.