Feathers Four Ways: Quilts for Janita, Paula, Mildred + Nanette

Happy Weekend, fellow quilt lovers!  I have been finishing a lot more quilts than blog posts over the past few months and it has created a backlog of unshared photos on my camera roll.  Today I'm sharing four different clients' quilts that I quilted with four different allover feather quilting designs, with a brief discussion of how the design, thread, and batting choices were selected for each quilt.  Here's a quick glimpse of the four quilts I'll be talking about today, made by my clients Janita, Paula, Mildred, and Nanette, and quilted by Yours Truly:

Clockwise from Top Left: Feathers and Pearls I, Angel Wings, Abundant Feathers, Fast Feathers

Janita's Flying Geese Sampler: Abundant Feathers

Janita chose the Abundant Feathers quilting design for her cheerful flying geese sampler quilt (I don't have the name of her quilt pattern but if anyone recognizes it, please let me know and I'll update the post accordingly).  I just love the playful energy of her color palette of red, pink and aqua against a crisp white background!

Janita's 70 x 87 Flying Geese Sampler with Abundant Feathers E2E

Abundant Feathers is a very versatile design that looks good on a lot of different quilts from modern to traditional or reproduction quilts.  There is extensive backtracking/overstitching in this design, which is why I recommended lightweight So Fine 50 wt matte polyester quilting thread in Pearl (this post contains affiliate links).  With a thin thread like So Fine, your eye isn't drawn to the double-stitched quilting lines, and on a quilt like this one that has high contrast between the background and pieced block fabrics, skinny So Fine thread will seem to "take on" the color of the fabric it's stitching across, appearing like a pale pink against the red fabric and pale blue against the aqua.  A thicker white or cream thread would not have blended into the darker fabrics that way.  We wanted to keep the focus on the variety of pieced blocks and fabrics in Janita's sampler quilt, with the feather quilting playing more of a supporting role.  One more thing to notice about Abundant Feathers is how evenly spaced the quilting is across the surface of the quilt with this design, compared to some of the other feather designs we'll be looking at in today's post.  That's something to think about when choosing between similar quilting designs, whether you prefer a balanced overall texture like Abundant Feathers or whether you want to see some variety between the more open feather parts of a design verses the denser details of pearls, echoes, etc.  

Drumroll, Please: MORE New Projects! Feathered Star Baby Quilt Variations Designed in EQ8

Oh, SHHH!!!  I hear you all, clucking your tongues at me in disapproval!  Designing new projects in EQ8 is GOOD for me, and this little detour from my immediate projects only took me about 20 minutes, I swear.

44" x 44" Feathered Star Baby Quilt, Designed in EQ8

Okay, so designing the "bones" of this baby quilt only took 15-20 minutes.  Click, click, click, done!  Then I spent another 45 minutes playing with different color schemes and fabric possibilities.

Same Quilt, This Time With Novelty Prints

And This One in Kaffe Fassett Collective Prints

How fun is that, to see right on my computer screen what a quilt would look like made up in different fabrics?  Isn't it cool to see how the same exact quilt can look so very different depending on the fabrics you choose?  Plus and besides, I just "made" three quilts for free, without even buying ANY fabric...  

I was inspired to go wandering off on this tangent by my friend Julie's gorgeous Feathered Star baby quilt in progress over at Pink Doxies.  Julie designed her quilt in EQ7 and is struggling with the feathered triangle points, and when I suggested paper piecing them she said something like she'd "rather give birth to a rhinoceros without an epidural than paper piece," so I was curious about how EQ software would divide a quilt block like this for paper piecing, and whether or not paper piecing it really WOULD be worse than childbirth.

The borders I put on my feathered star quilt are easy to paper piece in one section, and since the software calculates the sizes there's zero chance that I would mess them up and have to redo anything.  So I'm selecting the center of the quilt, the feathered star block, and asking EQ8 to generate foundation paper piecing patterns for me to print.

EQ8 Has Divided My Block Into Foundation Piecing Sections

As you can see, paper piecing offers no advantage for the inset LeMoyne Star portion of this block.  I would most likely just cut those pieces with my rotary cutter and use traditional piecing for that bit.  Each blue line you see above represents a line between separate foundation paper piecing patterns that need to be sewn to one another the regular way after you've finished paper piecing.  But paper piecing is going to get all of my feathered star points to finish exactly the right size on the first try, with no risk of chopped off points, swearing, or seam ripping.  That's worth the extra bother of printing the foundation paper patterns, don't you think?

Fitting Foundation Pattern Sections to my Printer Pages

So the next step is to arrange those foundation pattern sections on the print layout so that each of the pieces I'm planning to use for paper piecing fit entirely within single pages.  Otherwise, I'd need to align and tape together, and not only is that extra work, but it also introduces an opportunity for slight inaccuracy of alignment.  EQ8 lets me rotate each pattern section individually and drag it to the page where I want it to print (which I started to do in the screen shot shown above, but didn't finish since I'm not actually making this quilt right now).  One innovation that I really appreciate with the newest version 8 is that I can print out my foundation papers in color, which is a big help in ensuring that I sew the correct fabrics down to cover each patch.

My friend Julie's quilt design doesn't have a LeMoyne Star in the center of the feathered star, though.  Hers is more similar to this design:

Yet Another Feathered Star Baby Quilt Variation

So, how does a feathered star block like this one work for paper piecing?

EQ8 Has Divided My Block Into Paper Piecing Sections

As you can see, this type of feathered star block is even more conducive to paper piecing.  After I cover those foundation paper piecing patterns, I trim them down to size with my ruler exactly 1/4" from the seam lines, so I know they will fit together much easier than if I tried to piece all of this the traditional way.  Accurate piecing with foundation paper patterns is so easy, I swear it feels like cheating!

EQ8 Automatic Print Layout

As you can see in the screen shot above, EQ software separates the block between the individual foundation sections and then just plops them onto sheets of paper.  Some of the pieces for this block, like the large white corner squares and the four white QSTs (quarter square triangles) I am going to rotary cut, so I just deleted those from my print layout and rearranged the others so as to conserve paper while having each foundation section fit completely onto a page so I don't have to tape anything together.  This is an easier task with smaller blocks, by the way -- since the center block of this quilt finishes at 36" square, I have selected a 13" x 19" paper size this time that I would print at a copy shop.

My Revised Print Layout, No Taping Necessary

Now that I've scrambled up all the pieces, can you see why it's helpful to have everything numbered and labeled and colored in while I'm piecing the block?

So now I'm curious.  How many of you out there have PaperPiecingPhobia?  Would anyone like me to actually MAKE this quilt and show you here on my blog how easy it is?  If so, let me know in the comments!  (We all know I'm just looking for someone to give me an excuse to chase another squirrel, right?)  Although this would be yet another new project, I did finish something last week...  And this would be a manageable, 44" square baby quilt that would be pieced and moved onto my longarm frame relatively quickly...