Feather Lessons

I've been waiting (sort of) patiently for Judy to finish posting her feather lessons.  She's using a long arm, and I'm working on my domestic machine, so I needed to wait for her to get to the diamond sections before I could start.  Fortunately, she posted that today!  So my quilt went under the needle right away, and the first section is now complete. 

I'm pretty happy with my feathers. I wasn't comfortable with the path Judy took - she quilted up the spine, down one side and up the other (and then back down the spine to move on to the next feather.  My feathers look pretty rough when I quilt down, so I decided to all the feathers quilting up the spine. This meant marking the spine, so that I could quilt up one side, down the middle, up the other, and back down the middle again.  I think it worked out really well, and maybe next time I'll be ready to try quilting the feathers downwards.

I think I'm going to do a meander in the background sections, rather than the feather wreaths Judy showed. I think my son, who already requested this quilt, would prefer that.  So, after dinner I'll be back upstairs doing some meandering and hopefully even starting on the green feathers.  I'm quilting each section in matching thread, so there will be lots of thread changes in this quilt.

Now that the center is done, I can see that I did not align the backing quite perfectly.  The center of the backing star is a couple of inches out of alignment from the front.  Shhh.  Don't tell Colin - he probably won't notice :)