Giant English Paper Pieced Star Quilt

A couple years ago, my sister had an idea for a Lone Star quilt where the first 1/8 is 1 diamond, the next 1/8 is 4 diamonds (2 x 2), the next 1/8 is 9 diamonds (3 x 3), all the way around until the last one is 64 diamonds (8 x 8).

Then last year I decided that we should enter something into the hand sewing category at Quiltcon.  We decided that it would be easiest to use English Paper Piecing (EPP) to make all the diamonds.  So, I bought some posterboard and then cut it up into the diamonds that we would use for EPP.  I mailed half of the diamonds to my sister and kept the other half for myself.

After a long time, we completed the EPP of the diamonds themselves and then we started attaching them to one another to form giant diamonds.

The hardest part was putting the giant diamonds together (by hand) because they were so large and unwieldy!

Then we used clear thread and the sewing machine to attach the star to the white background, there was no way I was doing that by hand!  (bonus pic of the quilt inspector on the quilt top)

We wanted the star to be offset on the background so somehow we ended up with almost a queen size quilt!  I am still not sure how that happened.

It was so hard to hang up this quilt to get pictures!  I ended up putting nails in the wall and using binder clips to hand the quilt.  It led to some undesirable wrinkles in the quilt top for the photos.

 

Here you can see a close up of the quilting.  We machine quilted it with straight lines.  Each of the diamonds was stitched with a color matching the diamond (it looks neat on the back!) and then in the white we quilted straight line echoes of the lone star, increasing the distance between the lines as you get further from the center of the quilt.

Truthfully, I hated this quilt by the time we were done with it.  It ended up just too big and unwieldy and I just don't enjoy wrestling queen size quilts through my domestic sewing machine to do the quilting.  I actually just gave it to my sister recently so it could live at her house, but now that I am looking at the pictures again it is growing on me in a weird way... now I think it looks neat instead of hating it haha.

In the end, this quilt was a "Quiltcon reject" so no one ever got to see it.  Now it is living with my sister and hopefully she will enjoy using it.  It would be a great summer quilt on a bed :)

Linking up with Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts