Plates and carats

This is Judy's scrappy Dresden plate quilt - she plans to use it on her bed and didn't want it heavily quilted.  Usually I do SID on a custom quilt but because this is a large quilt it would have added a lot to the price.  Judy decided to have me do custom without SID.  I think it worked well, with the wool batt the quilt looks warm and puffy and will make a great bed quilt.  Not every quilt needs to be quilted to death.

Speaking of quilted to death, I think I have never posted pictures of the latest show quilt Gail Stepanek and I finished.  I wanted to wait until it had been in a show and then forgot about it.  This is Cache of Carats, so named because Gail hand pieced the entire quilt from diamonds.  When she first started sending pictures of it to me as she worked on it I was stumped on how to quilt it.  For one thing it is hand pieced and all the seams are pressed open which rules out any SID.  It is also asymmetrical and I'm so used to nice symmetrical traditional quilts that it hurt my brain coming up with a quilting design. 

.

 

 

 

 

 

I finally decided to treat all the starbursts as circles and cut out snowflake-type designs to quilt over them.
It was messy but fun cutting them.

 

 

 

 

In a rare moment of brilliance I decided to cut them out of freezer paper.  That meant that when finished, I could iron them to the front of the quilt top for marking, rather than having to trace through the top with a lightbox.  I used about a dozen white Clover markers marking this quilt.  It showed up well on the brown but the fabric in the starbursts is too dark for a blue marker to show up and almost too light for the white marker.  I had to go over and over the lines to get them to show up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I then quilted the starbursts with different colors of metallic thread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The borders I quilted with Masterpiece cotton thread in a diamond pattern, appropriately enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gail and I are pleased that this quilt just won a third place ribbon at Road to California.