Machine Quilting: Paper Pieced Hunter Star Plus

Sharon sent me this quilt she made. It is like a Hunter Star, but there's an extra point added in... Anyway, it's beautiful!

 All of the background prints were these gorgeous Orientals with a slight metallic sheen. Being that the pattern is traditional with a twist and with the fabrics being, well, not traditional - I was stumped at first how to attack this one. Oriental fabrics and quilts are very theme specific but I wasn't sure Sharon wanted that since she chose a traditional style pattern. This one took a little back and forth, a few alcoholic beverages, some pondering, some late night ideas and a bunch of doodles to come up with the right compromise.

 This quilt was quite large and it's hard to tell in the pictures because of the scaling, but these blocks were small. There were just lots of them and since the quilting was scaled in proportion to the quilt blocks, it's very deceiving. The quilting was maybe 1/2" apart at the most in the background swirls.

 I switched to a tad darker thread to quilt the stars themselves because the metallic was a little different. The lighter thread was too light. You can't really see it here, but there's a dahlia like flower in the star.

 You can see it a bit better here. I also quilted some "leaves" in the red points so even though it's not really - this was the tying factor to the Oriental fabrics with some organic style flowers and leaves between the waves and swirls.

Here's the back of the quilt, without all of the different fabrics and colors you can see the quilting so much better.

This was a fun quilt to work on and Oriental quilts are always the hardest for me to design and plan. They're so theme specific that it really limits my options and I have to do a ton of research before each and every one like this that I receive.

Thank you, Sharon!