Spring 2012 Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Updated

A friend of mine convinced me to enter a quilt into the Bloggers' Quilt Festival, so here's my entry for this Spring Edition..  Just a FYI - I was assigned #406 if you want to vote for my quilt.  Thanks much.

Gracie's Stars was started as a BOM for one of my quilt guilds and I was trying to use up some Aunt Grace fabrics scraps that I had left over from another project.  I wasn't real fond of working with these reproduction 30's fabrics because I have a collection of original 1930's quilts using the "real" 30's fabrics and feed sacks of the times and I didn't need another 1930's-look quilt.   But I started making each month's blocks from my scraps anyway, trying to use them up..  When I had 9 blocks finished, I decided I was tired of doing them and wanted to get it done and on to something new.

Then came the call for finished quilts for our guild quilt show in a couple of months.  This was to be hung with other BOM for that year-2010.  Now I was being forced to finishing it quickly!  Then came the problem of how to make it unique.  I played around until I came up with several ideas but none excited me much.  When I decided to make narrow sashing strips between the blocks with multiple colors and added a cornerstones with 4 different colors in each quarter to match the strip going into the block, they looked like little arrows pointing into the cornerstones.  This got me real excited because it made the quilt look better.  By the time I added the pieced triangle border, I was really getting excited and was having fun watching it evolve.  This was turning out a whole lot better than I thought and now I really like it!  It was a good thing there was a deadline or I might have kept adding borders and trying new ideas.  It measures 60" x 60".  The name comes from the type of fabric used, not any relative in our family.  :)

Gracie's Stars

I learned several things from this quilt - never give up trying different ideas until something works.  I had to do a lot of re-calculating and "fudging" to get things to match up in the borders, sashings and cornerstones; but in the end it all came together.  This quilt afforded me the opportunity to try new ideas and techniques, with no preconceived idea of what would look good or how it would work.  The other challenge I had on this quilt was the quilting.  I played with new quilting designs that I had never done before.   I had just bought a long arm and hardly knew how to thread it much less quilt a custom quilt on it -- but I did try it just the same.  After all, it was going to be "my" quilt so if it wasn't perfect, it would be my "beginner sampler".  I'm proud that I finished it and that it turned out as well as it did.  It gave me confidence that with more practice, I'll get better.

Here are a few close-up shots of the blocks and quilting detail.

Quilting from the back

Thanks for stopping by to see my quilt and thank you Amy for sponsoring the Bloggers' Quilt Festival.  Seeing all the quilts is such an inspiration.