Free Motion Friday - Sarah's Star Quilt

Happy Friday! I'm feeling very proud of myself for having two weeks in a row with pre-scheduled posts. I'm writing this from the distant past of last Thursday... after forgetting last week (2 weeks ago for you future peeps who are actually reading this) I'm trying to get ahead a bit.

Sarah and I are Quilting Soul Mates, I'm fairly certain. I love everything she does, and have so much fun playing with her quilts. You can see her previous quilts here and here as well as one of her finished quilts based on a FMF here.  You can also follow her awesome instagram account here.

I started by adding a box around the pieced star, and then adding extra star points to the star.

Next some dot-to dot in the quilted star points. I only drew one set here, but you could easily do more than one to emphasise these more.

Then I filled the points with feathers. Seriously, feathers are my favourite to quilt. They are a lot of peoples favourite I think. They are fast, once you get the hang of them, they are easy, and they add class and softness to quilts. I don't however, quilt them nearly as often as I would like -- I don't make a lot of quilts that I want to add softness too. I'm forever doing geometric quilting designs. But the girly pretty fabrics in this one just call for feathers.

I next went into my star points and added a back and forth around my feathers to make them really pop.  This is one of my favorite things to do with feathers. You can see an example on Granny's Butterfly Quilt.

The back and forth just really make the feathers pop and almost look trapunto'd.

Then, in the center I did some continuous curve in the diamonds, with the exception of the pink floral row, where I put a row of feathers going in a circle around the star.

Then, feathers in the border. I would go in and add a back and forth design after the feathers are finished. I actually love feather borders, because I find them fairly easy to do without having to turn my quilt on the long arm, I can just pick up the feather where it left off.

Then, two options for the center. First, something similar to how I quilted Dad's Feathered Star:

Quilting a bo shape throughout the quilt, to make it look as though the star is lying on top of a quilted square.

The second option is to simply fill in the background with a background filler -- I'd choose something fairly dense so the star is less densely quilted than the background-- this will make it pop a bit so that it is the focus of your eye.

So that's this week! Remember, if you want to make my day and have your quilt be a part of Free Motion Friday, email a picture of if to kathleen(at)kathleenquilts.com

Later days! Kathleen.