Kathryn (and crew) gave me a couple of bundles of Fat Quarters as a gift several years ago. I know it was a few years ago because I worked on it at one of the Mount Washington retreats and we haven’t done one of those for at least three years! This project was on my Guild UFO list; it had been sitting waiting to be quilted for probably a year at least.

I wanted to do straight line quilting for this; somehow I thought it would be easier than free-motion. I need to put up a big sign in my sewing room to remind me that straight lines, no matter what pattern, are slow and time-consuming. Lesson learned.

I used four different straight-line patterns for the quilting, depending on the size of the centre square of the block. I started with cross-hatching but by the end I was just making straight lines any-which-way across the blocks.

I’ve never sent a quilt through the mail until now. I packed it in a Space Bag (and sucked the air out of it with my vacuum) and I was surprised that it wasn’t very expensive.

This is the third project I’ve completed since I started sewing with the Thursday group. I originally thought I would donate this to the Member Appreciation event at Cranberry Hall (the backing is some musical-notation fabric) but once it was done I decided I wanted to keep it for myself.

The star itself is paper pieced and the quilting idea for the corners came from an on-line free-motion quilting challenge I’m keeping track of. I added some meandering in the set-in triangle pieces around the star. The loops in the border came from a quilting book I have in my own library and the quilting in the yellow corners is my own design.