Another epic quilt tale

I had been seeing the Rose Star pattern on several blogs and it looked like a great hand piecing project so I ordered a Kite template from QuiltSmith.  Wanting my project to evolve quickly, I ordered the largest one.  Oh well, I’m a firm believer that mistakes breed creativity   The resulting “blocks” were going to be really too huge (the tiles on my design floor are 12″)!

Next I played around with just two rounds of kites instead of five but was not sure I liked that plan so I decided to first play with some odds and ends fabrics.  You can see the scale as the green and pink block is laid out on a 17″ square table.

While all the fabrics are bright, some blocks had less contrast and I was not liking how they hung together.  So I decided to add strips between the columns and use that same fabric for borders.  After that I started liking it better.

Before I joined the last column, I did a final rearrangement.  After the border was on, my friend Val took me to meet her long arm quilter–my very first foray into having someone else do my quilting.  From the beginning, I have either hand quilted my quilts or done a bit of elementary machine quilting.  Now my hands are objecting to hand quilting and I wanted this one to look better than what would result from my machine quilting skills.  I got it back quickly and am pleased with the results.  I tried to capture a bit of the overall quilting.  Will show the back after I get the binding on.

Now I will do something similar with the original pieces I cut.  But at QuiltFest this year I bought a smaller kite template, so two quilts later, I do still plan to make a Rose Star!