My friend Adele and her daughter Lychelle designed this beautiful quilt without any patterns to follow. It is based on a photo of an Amish Star.  When they brought me the quilt top I said I was hesitant to make recommendations until I had a chance to mull it over for a time. 

The Quilt top prior to quilting.

 My first instinct was feathers and they liked that idea.  So I started searching for spectacular feathers.  The shapes used in this quilt were all custom and so none of the patterns I had fit well.  I thought diamonds would be easy to find but after days of searching I finally found Nancy Haacke of Wasatch Quilting who agreed to let me bring her the quilt top to analyse.  She designed some beautiful patterns for this quilt.

This shows the detail of the diamonds.  I used two different diamond designs, one for the horizontal and a different one for the vertical diamonds.

 One of the biggest challenges in quilting this was that each diamond had to be individually sized and placed. Stitching together log cabin pieces into a diamond shape and then creating the design from there creates so many seams that are on the bias.  So when you quilt, the fabrics and seams all draw up differently depending on the density, the seam allowances, the stretch, the bias etc.  

This is the Snowflake star diamond or Vertical Diamond.  Nancy Haacke created the quilting pattern for me.

 The odd shaped corners and the direction of the diamonds presented a challenge as they were too large for my throat space and so I could only quilt certain pieces and then turn the quilt and stitch from the other direction.  

 There were times that I wondered what on earth this would look like by the time it was finished. I was so thrilled when that last piece was finished and all the fullness created by the random order of the quilting was finally eased into quilting.

SUCCESS!!!!   I finished this quilt on the night of July 24th after 57+ hours of stitching, 14 hours of unpicking and untold hours of dreaming about the patterns.  I was so grateful when Adele picked it up and told me I had far surpassed her expectations.  She was thrilled. Lychelle had just left town for 3 days and the timing was perfect for her to be able to spend those three days binding the quilt in preparation for display at the wedding on August 4th. 

Adele let me take the quilt back while Lychelle is on her honeymoon so that I could enter it in the Alpine Days Quilt Show.  I  hope they will show it well.  She bound it with a dark green which frames it very nicely.