My first big quilt show

Way back in the mid 1980s, I went to my very first Paducah quilt show.  Those of you who have been there know just how awe-inspiring that was.  The quilts just knocked my socks off.  The vendors were wonderful.  And Hancocks of Paducah!  That was like dying and going to heaven!  At the time, we were still using a credit card, and I think I wore the magnetic right off it.  I came home with lots of Jinny Beyer fabrics, and with this quilt in my head, just waiting to be drafted.  I wanted to explore using the stripes in pieced blocks, and using fabric value to try to give the impression of light moving across the surface of the quilt.  I used 3 traditional blocks for the center medallion and put the whole thing on point.  Then I found that really neat border that looks sort of like the Card Tricks block, in one of Jinny Beyer's books, and used a lot of different greens to piece that.  It sat around a few years as a top, because I couldn't come up with a good way to quilt it.  Eventually, I had a friend quilt it for me with her new longarm machine.  She did all those lovely feathers freehand.  She's a real artist.  The quilt went to some shows, didn't win in the big ones, but did in some smaller ones.

One of the things I learned while doing this quilt was how to elongate a pattern for the corner stars in the border.  Easy Peasy if you have graph paper.  I love graph paper.  Another thing was how to make sure the striped fabric comes out matching in the corners, thanks to a handout from Jinny Beyer's class.  And that someday I want to do a whole quilt using that center block, Royal Star.  Using mirrors, I could see that it would make a really nifty overall design.  Then when I got my EQ program, I could put them together on that to see how effective it was.  So many quilts, so little time.....

Here is a closeup to show the quilting, the use of stripes in the block, and the border.  I love the border, but it was a pain in the whatchamacallit to piece.

Last year, our quilt guild was short on Fire Quilts (we give quilts to families that have been through house fires) so I donated this one.  I understand the family that got it liked it.

ETA, the quilt was named A Midsummer Night's Dream, since the illusion of light behind the center and in the corners reminded me of moonlight coming through leafy tree branches.