Whew!  I am finally starting to catch up with everything that’s fallen by the wayside for the past 18 months. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but I decided to go back to my alma mater for another degree. Silly me – I thought as a mature adult, I’d get the work done in half the time and have plenty of “me” time. That never happened, not one single semester, not one single class!  It turns out there are all sorts of people who go back to earn a college degree in their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s – and older which I thought was pretty cool. Some classes I loved every minute.  A couple didn’t necessarily excite me but were required.  But I did receive the official email that I am done and the degree should be back from the printer and mailed to me in about six weeks.

Naturally the first thing I did the minute I finished that last paper was to start quilting! I have a few quilts that have stacked up while I decided what I wanted to quilt on them.  I could’ve finished this one – Blazing Star – a long time ago except I knew I didn’t want to do an all-over pattern…but I didn’t know what I did want to do. This quilt finishes at 99″ x 99″ so there is a lot of room to play with. I had looked at roughly a bazillion lone star quilts to see how the star was quilted.  In nearly all of them, it was an orange peel quilting pattern. That lends itself well to 2″ strips but this star is huge – I think each blade is 3 or 4″ wide.  Once I finally had the star figured out, then the rest was pretty easy.

I don’t have a closeup of the border here but I knew I wanted to do straight lines in the navy to create the flow that the fabric layout lends itself to. There are 4 different blocks, 2 each, in the quilt so I created a different pattern for each of those 4 areas.  Then I quilted feathers in the large cream squares that surround the quilt.  Finally, the smallest areas – the squares on point and the quarter square triangles in the border – took a lot of time because there were so many of them and since it went literally to the edge I needed to be careful on the sizing.

I still need to bind it. I’m working on a quilt for a friend and she’s coming over tomorrow to get an update so it will be at least Friday before I start the binding. I couldn’t wait to share pictures though in the meantime.

If you happen to use Shopify or WordPress to sell things online, and would be willing to give me some pointers, would you please drop me a note at contact@texasquilting.org?  I have some ideas mulling around in my head now but I’m not sure which is the best way to go and if it matters whether it’s downloadable products vs. actual “put in the mail” products.