Bloggers Quilt Festival

A few blogs I follow are participating in Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival so I thought I would join in as well.

Looking through my past quilts brought up a lot of memories!  Each quilt truly has it's own story.  And even though I've been quilting for a long (longer than many people in my new quilt guild!) I am the slow and steady type, so I don't have a massive quilt repertoire.  

I decided to share a quilt that I made in high school, around 2005 or 2006.  This quilt is a modified lone star that was paper pieced.  The pattern was from a book but unfortunately I can't remember the name and the book is at my parents' house. Edit: figured out the book title! Split-Diamond Dazzlers.

This quilt is very special to me because it was the first quilt where I really owned it from start to finish, with minimal help from my mom or others.  Quilts I had made before this were ones that my mom had helped a lot with.  The quilt directly before this one, in my early high school years, I made independently but it was a BOM so I didn't pick the fabrics or do much of the heavy lifting.

For this lone star, I picked the pattern, picked all of the fabrics, did all of the cutting and piecing by myself, and then hand quilted the whole thing.  I learned a bit about colors when making this quilt.  I started out with a lovely pink fabric, accentuated it with purples, then decided to throw in some yellow.  But I really should have looked carefully at the pattern first, because the yellow ended up being really dominant. After I made the star and border, I spent a verrrry long time at the quilt store trying to find a background color to tie the whole thing together and tone the yellow way down.  The blue I ended up was certainly not the firs thing my mind would have gone to for a background, but I think it really worked and makes the main design pop.

Unfortunately this quilt is also back home at my parents' house, so I don't have any good close-ups of the quilting.  But I did echo quilting around every seam in the star, then quilted stars all over the blue background.  Because I lived in Alaska, I put polar fleece on the back for super warmth and increased snuggle factor.  :)

This quilt won honorable mention at the fair.  I guess I must have been 18 when I entered it, because it was my first year not competing in the youth categories (which, let's face it, have much less fierce competition.)  So even getting a ribbon of any kind was nice.

I hope you've enjoyed reading about my quilt.  It holds a special place in my heart and every time I visit my parents I get to see it again and say hello.  :)