The last of four quilts is bound - and a goal is reached.

Because we were stuck inside today, I had plenty of time this afternoon to hand stitch the last quilt binding.  It feels so good to have these done!  Now, all that is left of the five quilted projects that have been needing binding for two years is the 30's double wedding ring.  Next week I'll add to the quilting on that one, and then will get out my books to figure out how to do a binding on a scalloped edge.  That is one thing I've never done!

This feathered star quilt, as well as the one I finished a few days ago, are two samples I made while teaching two different sessions of a feathered star piecing class.  I had a third quilt - done in beiges and rusts - that I "sold" in trade for machine quilting on the quilt I made our son and his new wife.  It was a top I loved, but my quilter needed a wall-sized quilt top "Now!" to finish as a gift.  The trade worked well for both of us.

I love making feathered stars, but most of those I've made have been smaller blocks - either for quilts of my own or 12" exchange blocks.  I do have one more UFO that has a center feathered star.  That is one I plan to finish in the next couple months - at least to the stage of a finished top.  This is the 2003-2004 Girl Gang quilt designed by Jan Patek and Cherie Ralston.

The quilt has a top and bottom row of simple pieced blocks - the Indian Hatchet block is the name.  I will do those in reds and browns I think - maybe with some blue and gold also.  Or maybe just browns and golds.  Then there is a complex applique border all around the outside of the top.  I hope to have all the Indian Hatchet blocks done by the end of the month.

I'm so eager for this top to be done, as I really love it.  You can chuckle at the date in the center block - that's the year I thought the quilt would be finished.  This project was started in 2003 -  I think it is past time it is finished.  Don't you?

Finished!

The center of the Girl Gang feathered star is finished, and I'm very pleased with it. The next step is to trim up the edges as I used oversized triangles, and then add the top and bottom border. That step should go very quickly. Then all that remains is four large, heavily appliquéd borders. Those will take awhile!

I received the next Jan Patek mini quilt in the mail yesterday. It's a bunny and a flower - perfect for this season. I didn't start the Valentines quilt when it arrived, so I need to catch up. I've cut out the Valentines quilt and prepped the hearts for appliqué. That's my next project - that and getting back to the last two Heirloom Stitches borders.

I'm sending hugs and huge thank you's to all of you who prayed and/or kept positive thoughts these last few weeks for our family. The surgery went fine - I was in the waiting room for 11 hours that day - the patient is home and doing well. All cancer was removed with next to no expectations of any recurrence. We won't know if chemo is required until next Wednesday. Everything is as good as it could be - and I know all your thoughts and prayers made a huge difference. I love all of you and send my thanks.

Jan Patek's Girl Gang Feathered Star quilt

I have what I think is really good news - at least for a few of you. I was talking to Barbara at Jan Patek Quilts - I confess, I've succumbed to this year's mystery - and I told her that there was interest in the Star Quilt since I started posting pictures of my version on my blog. I told her I was sorry that they'd never put it out in a book or pattern form because I thought many people would be interested in having it.

Barbara checked with Jan, and has just sent me an email. For $15 you can get the packet of instructions for the 2003-2004 Girl Gang Feathered Star. None of the extra projects will be included, and there is no colored picture of the quilt. It does include all the instructions and patterns for making the large quilt.

If you are interested either call them at (816) 632-7632 or email them at info@janpatekquilts.com. If you click on the link in the first paragraph you will be taken to her website.

You can see my version of the quilt here. No connection to Jan at all - just a quilter who loves her fabrics and designs.

Another block is ready

Update - both eagle blocks are now ready for appliqueing.

I had next to no time yesterday for quilting as it turned out. I wanted to make sure that didn't happen today. So . . . when I got home from the Weight Watchers meeting (we won't talk about my weigh-in this week as it wasn't good) I got back to prepping eagle blocks. The first one is ready for stitching. I wasn't at all sure if this was the right fabric choice for the eagle, but now that the block is together I've decided I like the visual texture of the fabric. Of course I had to pin it up on the wall to see how it's going to look in the quilt - I like it!

I wanted to see how one of the new blocks looked when pinned into place on the quilt. I like it!

Off to the wholesale house today as I need batting for customer quilts. This afternoon I'll prep the eagle blocks.

I think I gave the wrong impression in my tutorial. Much of the prep work involved is the same as what I've already been doing - tracing pattern onto freezer paper, cutting it out, ironing it onto the fabric and then cutting out the fabric pieces. The difference is this - I used to iron the freezer paper onto the right side of the fabric and then traced around it with a permanent pen. Now I iron it to the backside and use the brush, iron, water and stiletto to turn under the seam allowance. So the reality is that the prep time is only a bit longer than before. And it's more than made up for by the speed with which I can do the actual applique when the seams are already turned under.

Next two blocks prepped

Today I prepped the next two blocks for the Feathered Star Girl Gang quilt. All I need to do is baste the pieces down and it will be ready to go. Tomorrow I plan to prep the two eagle blocks. I'm going to be needing lots of handwork at the end of this week as I'll be doing a lot of sitting in waiting rooms. Between these four blocks and the last two borders of Heirloom Stitches I'll be all set. I love fussy cutting large floral prints for "painted" vases!

The fabric makes all the difference

It took a little while for me to realize that it wasn't the red outside triangles that I didn't like in the picture I posted a little over a week ago. I liked the red - I just didn't like the fabrics that I dug out of my stash to use. So Tuesday I went shopping- I mentioned that yesterday. Today I cut red triangles from the new fabrics and pinned them onto the design wall. What a difference! This quilt now sings to me just as I imagined it would. It took the correct red fabrics to make the difference.

Now I'm so eager to prep the last four applique blocks, get them stitched, and sew part of this top together.

Back once again

I was so glad to be back blogging, and now I disappeared again for a few days. I either had a bad relapse of the bug I was fighting or I caught a new virus, as I've been pretty sick since Thursday. The past week has been rough for most of our family - most everyone seemed to have some sort of relapse. All the adults that is - Joseph has been just fine.

I really didn't feel like sewing for several days. I had such hopes of finishing the applique on the second Heirloom Stitches border, but it didn't happen. I finally felt like sewing again a couple days ago, and that's when things started to happen.

Today I finished that second border, so I sewed the first two onto the Heirloom Stitches center. I took the feathered star off the design wall so I could get a good picture. I'm so happy with how this has turned out! The applique is simple, except for all those big jagged leaves. The other two borders are basically the same. I sure hope they can be done by the end of this month.

I headed back to Primitive Thimble in Battle Ground to find some new reds for the feathered star. Even though things are really picked over - not much left due to the moving sale - I found some nice things. So I washed and pressed them today, so they are ready and waiting to be cut into outside setting triangles. While the quilt was off the design wall I sewed the first part of it all together. Amazing how doing that little makes the goal of a finished top so much closer. I wanted a primarily red and brown quilt when I first started this one, so I'm thrilled you all encouraged me to stick with that decision. It's now pinned back onto the wall, with other four finished blocks pinned into position. Tomorrow I hope to start prepping those last four center blocks. You may notice that the lilies are now growing rightside up instead of sideways. Jan's original design has them sideways, but I decided I wanted mine growing the way God intended them to grow!

This is the first time I've rolled the new pressing station into the hall so I could use the full design wall. It worked just as well as I hoped it would - except for the fact that I can't roll the cabinet myself. No matter - that's what sweet, understanding and caring husbands are for!

Seeking your opinion

I guess I need help with this Feathered Star quilt. I thought I knew just the changes I wanted to make, but when I made them all I still wasn't satisfied.

In the first picture I've changed all the triangles - darker around the center block and blue instead of red around the edges. I think I like the blue much better than the red - it brightens up the entire quilt. However - since the blue is so much lighter than the red I'm now thinking that maybe the dark center triangles are too dark.
So - I tried changing the center triangles to my first choice. I think I like this better - but I'm just not sure.

I'd like your opinion. Do you like the picture I posted yesterday the best? Or do you prefer the blue with the dark? Or the blue with the original brown plaid? I didn't take a picture of the darker with the red because I didn't like that at all - way too dark.

I'm not going to decide for sure until I make the other four applique blocks. In the meantime I'm leaving this up on my design wall to see if time will help me make a decision.

Please let me know which of these three choices you prefer, or whether you think I should head to the quilt shop for something else entirely. Thanks for your input!

More info about the feathered star

I love this quilt, and I can't blame anyone for asking about it. I've been a big fan of Jan Patek's for years and years, and have managed to acquire - often through Ebay - almost all of her books and many of her patterns. I know this pattern was never published in a book or as a stand alone pattern. Many of the previous Girl Gang's have been a separate book, but not this one. The feathered star by itself was published in 2003 in a book called Piece and Plenty that she co-authored with Cherie Ralston. It was actually Cherie who drafted the feathered star for this quilt.

All I can suggest is that you keep an eye out on Ebay for anything by Jan Patek. It's possible that someone will want to sell their Girl Gang collection.

In case you are curious, I've posted a drawing of the complete quilt. All design rights - of course! - belong to Jan Patek and/or Cherie Ralston.

2003-2004 Girl Gang Feathered Star

This quilt is one of my two oldest UFO's. It was the new Girl Gang project when I first joined the Girl Gang group is fall 2003. The group met at Cottons in Battle Ground, WA - a wonderful shop that was featured as one of the top 10 shops in Quilt Sampler magazine early on. As long as I attended meetings I kept up nicely - finishing the blocks for each month. I even put the year I expected to finish in the center block, figuring that would give me a year to quilt it after the last block was done.

Shortly after I started the Carolina Lily blocks Cottons suddenly announced they were closing in a couple weeks. Once the shop was gone the Girl Gang group that met there disintegrated, and I was no longer motivated to proceed. We did receive the rest of the patterns, but without the incentive of showing the finished blocks every month I moved on to something else.

Skip forward to November of last year. With only three long-term projects (formerly UFO's) remaining in the unfinished top stage - all applique projects - I decided to work on them all BOM style this year, as I explained in this post. I spent some of December prepping the blocks (all of which I finished during the "plague".) After I finished the two Carolina Lily blocks I figured I'd prep the other four blocks soon, so would need to put the quilt onto my design wall to help in choosing fabrics.

A couple days ago I spent some time putting everything up on the wall. I cut a bunch of setting triangles so I could arrange everything in the final set up. Sure looks different this way - much farther along than it looked with just the blocks hanging on a skirt hanger in the closet. When I stood back and looked I knew I'd have to get the rest of the blocks finished quickly - I was eager to turn it into a finished top. (Of course, I didn't discover that the lily block on the right is turned around the wrong way until AFTER I took the picture!)

I looked at it again yesterday afternoon as I was sitting appliqueing. I've decided I don't like the fabrics I chose for the setting triangles. So I have a new batch picked out - quite different from these - and tomorrow I'll cut new triangles to see if I like it better. I'll probably start prepping the remaining blocks - two eagles and two flower bouquets.

The quilt has a zigzag border on top and bottom outside the setting triangles to turn it into a rectangle, then four large appliqued borders to finish it off. Hopefully I'll be able to show you steady progress on this top the next few months. I'd love to have the top finished end of summer if not the beginning.

Appliqueing I will go

It's truly amazing how much applique one can finish when one does nothing else all day for several days. Just so you have an idea how much time I'm talking about - during the week when the virus was the worst I listened to unabridged versions of Pillars of the Earth and Shadow of the Wind, plus a Nevada Barr mystery thrown in between the two epics, appliqueing the entire time - almost 70 hours total.

First I tackled the third block of Times Remembered, which I prepped at the end of last December. The pieces were large, so it didn't take that long to finish it. Now three blocks are done, with six more to prep and finish.

Next I got out the two Carolina Lily blocks for Jan Patek's Feathered Star - Girl Gang 2003-2004. Those took a little longer since there were two of them.

My fourth applique block was the last block I had prepped from my Mid-Century Album class. I really loved how it turned out. This is another that I prepped at the end of last year. It was so much fun choosing the fabrics for this one. Now I need to prep a bunch more blocks so progress on this quilt can continue.

Lastly I pulled out the borders for Heirloom Stitches and started working on them again. I finished one border and now have the second border almost completed. When I finish it I'll sew those two onto the quilt top and take a picture to post. I'm sure most all of you have forgotten what this quilt looks like. I'm determined to finish the last two borders this month also so I'll have a finished quilt top by the end of the month.

Before I started the applique marathon I did finish the piecing I'd been doing before I got sick. I finished nine more blocks for the Hourglass Quilt - for a total of 13 blocks. Then I tucked that project away again, as I didn't have the energy to piece.

All this applique has really gotten me into the mood for hand stitching again - the virus effectively ended my desire to piece for the time being. Since my oldest WISP's are applique projects I guess that's a good thing!