Star quilt progress

I am loving this quilt.  While it is taking longer than I thought, (don't they always take longer than we think they will?) I  am enjoying every aspect of the quilting progress.  I have put many of the things I learned on the Road into practice while quilting this, and I can see progress in my own quilting.  Here are several pictures to share with you.

Showing off the ditch work, and the before quilting shot.

The after shot.  I love how the texture shows up in the angle shots.

The star design was inspired by my class with Jamie Wallen at Road.

 All feathers were done freehand, so they are all different.

 The general pattern of the feathers is the same, but I added variations to them.  I just felt that with so many feathers, if they were all exactly alike, things would look too predictable, and it would loose interest.

An overall shot.

Here is a tip I learned at Road from Dawn Cavinaugh when doing feathers as fillers or in a border.

Pick a direction you like to work with.  I like clockwise, so that is my new standard.  All the feathers in each individual block spin clockwise, so I didn't have any feathers going backwards.  This is helpful when doing feathers in a border also.  I have done feathers across the top of my quilt from left to right, gotten to the bottom of the quilt and repeated that same direction, so that somewhere I have feathers running into themselves.  If I now stick to my rule of having feathers move clockwise, when I get to the bottom border I will stitch the feathers right to left.  This "rule" also saves confusion if you turn your quilts to do your borders. Apply the same principle when turning your quilt, always turn it the same direction.

And on a completely different topic, but just for fun here is Micah and her baby brother Zeb.

Micah's mom asked her to get a toy for Zeb to look at.  We think she picked the toys that could look at Zeb.  All the cars have faces and they are all facing Zeb.

Thanks for reading and sharing my quilt journey.  I appreciate it.

Esther