Lone Star

 

Grandma and I both like many of the quilt patterns shown by Donna Jordan of Jordan Fabrics, and at the end of last year we decided we would each make the Lone Star quilt.  We both started in January, with grandma finishing a couple of months ago, while I finally finished the binding last night.

The quilt is made from a jelly roll, by strip piecing and sub cutting into diamonds.  Sounded straightforward enough, but it turned out that figuring out the right amount of offset to get those 45 degree diamond shapes to line up when sewing them together was trickier than it looks.  I definitely ended up redoing some seams, and a couple more than once, trying to get the seams to line up.  Once the diamonds were together, the setting triangles were added for the background.  I really like the black background on this quilt, but sewing two pieces of black fabric together was required much more lighting than usual.  

I decided to go off-pattern, and did a different border to what was outlined.  As a result, my quilt is square, rather than rectangle like the original. I also decided leave the quilt top in four pieces, and quilt separately as much as possible.  I had half an idea how I wanted to quilt it, and knew that it would be much easier in smaller sections.

The diamonds themselves were just straight line stitching to echo the seams, and something matching for the border triangles. But the four squares and four triangles were a feather-ish sort of design, which I copied onto press n seal and sewed over, rather than just winging it, as I wanted the quilting design to look the same. 

Overall I am happy with how this turned out, though there are definitely some things I'd do differently if I was making another one.  But who has time for that with all the other quilts that need to be made?