Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2013

Hello! Welcome to Poppyprint and the Blogger's Quilt Festival sponsored by Amy's Creative side twice a year to coincide with Fall and Spring Quilt Markets.

There haven't been many quilt finishes here since the last festival - I seem to have become a bag lady and have enjoyed making smaller projects that I can finish in an afternoon or two. I do have many quilts on the go in my brain, many sets of bee blocks awaiting assembly, two Scrap Vomit quilts (one basted for quilting, one a set of blocks) and a strong desire to start new projects. I know many of you are with me on this!

For the festival I'd like to share a small quilt with a rather big story. Three of my good blogging friends were a part of it's making and finishing, in addition to my small piecing effort.  The whole story is here for you to peruse if you feel like knowing more, but since there are hundreds of quilts to see in the festival, I'll keep it brief(er) here.

Cosmic Lipari

The fabrics are all luminescent Oakshott Lipari cottons sent to me from Michael Oakshott via Lynne . The pattern is an incredibly complicated-looking but easy to piece huge star block designed by Tracey (pattern and acrylic templates available on her blog! There isn't one single Y-seam, I promise) and finally, the completely mind-blowing quilting was done in trade by my local VMQG friend Janet. She's so talented and does this detailed work on her domestic machine. I knew the Lipari's deserved special treatment and she nailed it!

You've gotta see the back to really appreciate all of Janet's work!

I love the luxury, sheen and rich colours of the Lipari cotton so much (it's coloured thread shot with black thread) but man, it's really hard to do it justice in photos.

Just look at those perfectly plump feathers!

Check out the rest of the amazing festival, nominate your favs and then head back later this week to vote!

Luminescence Defined

My Lipari Cosmic Star is complete.  Prepare yourselves for this stunning transformation. A couple of weeks ago I shared this photo:

I let you know that my friend Janet of WhatComesNext? was busy working her free-motion feather magic on the quilt.  We spoke briefly about the quilting, but I let Janet know that I trusted her and wanted her to enjoy the process.  I've seen enough of Janet's work to know this quilt was in very capable hands!  I knew it would be amazing. I knew it would be awesome. I'm just not sure I knew it was going to be so ridiculously, perfectly, mindblowing.  Even if feathers are not your cup of tea, you cannot deny that this quilting literally, and figuratively, makes the quilt.  Check this out:

Other bloggers have written how difficult it is to capture the true luminescence of shot cottons, and especially the Liparis which are shot with black thread. They behave like silk in natural light and bounce a lot of light. I upped the contrast and saturation a bit on that photo above to best highlight the quilting for you.  Here are some close ups of Janet's beautiful work.

The central design was over-stitched with a silver metallic thread.

As you can see, I bound the quilt with the same tone on tone black batik as the background because I didn't want any attention drawn away from that star. Here's a shot of the back so you can have an idea of all the stitching and see how perfectly it is distributed. That is a hanging sleeve you see across the top.

I feel like my role in this quilt was pretty small actually, so I'm going to take a few lines to shout out my appreciation to everyone involved. Thank you to Lynne and Michael Oakshott for the opportunity to sew with these gorgeous cottons. I did use Mary Ellen's Best Press prior to cutting out those big wedge-shaped pieces and the oakshotts held the bias edge beautifully.  These cottons press crisp and retain their sheen!  Thank you Tracey for your easy-to-piece pattern that I will definitely make again. And thank you Janet, for taking this small quilt to stratospheric heights with your incredible quilting skills.