Star Bouquet is finished

Just to recap from earlier posts... I started this quilt in January this year after seeing these two photos ...

in this quilt history book....

I "needed" another English paper piecing project and loved the way Mary Leggett (the quiltmaker in 1862) had used colours and fussy cutting in these stars. The original was made in silks and must have really glowed.

It has been great fun to make this - especially the challenge of copying the colours and patterns of the fabrics. Mary's quilt was beautifully hand quilted but I have domestic machine quilted mine. I do love how Mary quilted but I wanted my stars to have a 3D quality so avoided quilting on top of them. I deliberated about adding more quilting in the hexagons but decided that soft and puffy was good.

Quilting in the ditch

Now for a rave about the quilting process. Skip this if you are not a mad domestic machine quilter! 

I free motion quilted, in the ditch, around each star. No marking needed - yay. After all the stop/start quilting (necessary but very time consuming) on my Carolina Lily quilt, it was bliss to find I could quilt this one as a series of continuous lines from top to bottom of the quilt - no stop/starts at all. The continuous line followed in and out down one side of a row of stars. Then the next line was in and out down the other side of the row of stars, and so on across the whole quilt. Brilliant - it was finished in a matter of a few hours. I kept the speed reduced so as to avoid wandering out of the ditch - easily done believe me.

Enough yabber ...more pictures. 

Love this backing fabric - have had it "in storage" for a few years waiting for the right project.

On the table outside

Close-up 

Hanging on the washing line

And this is where it is sitting folded for the moment: 

Now for a sad little tale about a Tulip Lasagne. Here it was at the end of winter - springing up nicely. 

It flowered really well, first orange blooms then through reds, pinks and white. But I waited too long to take a 'full-bloom' photo and, after a few days away ( when we had experienced very strong winds), found it  rather bedraggled with lots of blooms gone. So here it is...