Moda Just One Star Project – Quilts of Valor Quilting

I was so excited to be chosen as one of the long arm quilters to work on the Just One Star project. They collected over 1,800 star blocks from quilters around the country, and turned those into over 100 quilt tops to benefit Quilts of Valor.

Well, all those quilt tops had to get quilted, and one came my way.  Initially, I was going to do two of them, but I literally had a day and a half to turn them around, so I ended up only doing one quilt.

The quilt was overnighted to me and arrived on Wednesday.  It had to be back in Texas at moda HQ by Tuesday (tomorrow!) At the time, I thought I would be able to mail it out on Saturday, but I’ll tell you later why that was a really wrong assumption.  So literally I had about 2 days to turn this quilt around and get it back in the mail.

When I opened the box, I was actually surprised to find batting, backing, AND four charm packs as a thank you!

I gave one pack to my friend WenR, I’ll definitely keep one for myself, but the other two I’ll have to figure out a good use for them, maybe as a giveaway at some point.

The quilt itself is quite lovely; it’s an awesome pattern and really showcases the blocks:

I had an internal debate about the quilting on Wednesday, which resulted in no quilting getting done at all. I was torn between doing a pantograph or doing custom quilting.  I know that I can turn around a pantograph pattern very quickly, and if I’d done that, I could have put the quilt back in the box the next day.  To do custom quilting is many more hours worth of work – but if a soldier isn’t worthy of that time, then who is? (And it’s not really a matter of whether I agree with war or not, it’s more a function of recognizing a person who makes a sacrifice on behalf of others without regard for their own personal safety.)

Whenever I am conflicted like that (about the quilting) the best thing for me to do is nothing. So I just prepared the quilt for the long arm by pressing it and attaching the zippers.

On Thursday, I started to feel a little more sure that I would eventually do custom quilting, but I still hadn’t decided fully.  I did a little doodling on some Quilter’s Preview Paper and came up with this:

But still wasn’t completely sure so I slept on it again.  When I woke up on Friday, I knew that I would go ahead and do the custom quilting, but I was in trouble because that meant the quilt HAD to be finished on Saturday before 2PM in order to catch the UPS truck.  That’s problematic when you work during the day too!  So as a result, I didn’t actually start quilting until about 6PM on Friday night.

I loaded it sideways because that would enable me to do a lot of continuous lines without rolling the quilt. I did the quilting in two colors, red & white, so I first quilted all the red and then went back to quilt all the white.

With red up first, I stabilized the quilt on the edges, then I stitched in the ditch between the red & white stripes. I’ve been having problems with my eyes (the lids are swollen and the skin is cracking around them) so doing this ruler work was definitely not my best. After the SID was done, I used my 6″ clamshell ruler to add two nested rows of clamshells on the red stripe.

Stitching clamshells, or any round shape where you have to travel around a curve, can be challenging because of the fact that you’re driving the machine with one hand and holding the ruler with the other. I’m not ambidextrous, so I can only confidently drive with my right hand and hold the ruler with my left. For chamshells that are upside down, I have to hold the ruler like this until I almost bump into my hand:

And then I can reposition my hand and continue quilting:

Once the clamshells were finished on that stripe, I ended the stitching and went back to the beginning so I could decorate the clamshells. I used a piece of white chalk to roughly find the center point of the clamshell and a point about a 1/4 of the way up to give me some guidelines to drive the quilting:

I did loops and shooting stars in and between the clamshells:

The shooting stars were really fun because it felt like lighting fireworks! You push up on the machine and jiggle it a little to get a wavy line, then draw a 5-point star, then squiggle back down to the starting point, and do another. You’re not trying to make the stars perfect or get the lines to match up so you have freedom to just stitch at will.

It was at this point that I got stuck about what to do in the white stripes, so my friend WenR came over to help. We talked through a couple of options and came up with a plan. I would squiggle-outline the stars in red, draw a freehand star in the center, and then on the blue fabric with the white stars, I’d quilt in a verse of the Star Spangled Banner. The verse I selected was:

Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free
And the home of the brave

Sounds cool right? Well, it was getting pretty late by then, so I only got as far as one white stripe before I was too tired to do more. I can’t do ruler work late at night, plus my eyes were starting to feel gritty. But here’s what one of those blocks looks like:

I got up pretty early on Saturday morning and started quilting around 7am. I realized then that I had a manicure scheduled for 10:30, and I wasn’t too sure I’d be able to finish by then. So I worked up to about 9:30 and realized it wasn’t going to happen. Luckily, my manicurist was able to get one of her customers to switch with me and I could go in at 12:30. That meant having to get dressed and go to UPS before the nail appointment, so I had to be finished by 11:30. Funny how moving the appointment by two hours resulted in only an extra hour of quilting!

Finally, I made it to the bottom of the quilt at around 10:45:

But remember – I had only done the red quilting by this point – I still had the white backgrounds to fill in, plus that big blue expanse! Reluctantly, I abandoned the idea of quilting the SSB, because quilting full sentences takes planning and a little practice to get the spacing right, and there just simply was not enough time. So I quickly changed colors, and just did super-fast loops on the white stripes:

I snuck my name into the quilting:

And then quilted bigger loops and stars on the blue & white star fabric:

The last stitch went in at 11:24am, which gave me 6 minutes to pull it off the zippers, snap a couple of photos, fold it and slap it in the box. Here are the last few photos I took before putting it in the box:

I had fun with this quilt and I’m really glad I decided to do the custom quilting. It was well worth it, although when I got to the UPS store, they told me that UPS Ground doesn’t pick up on Saturday, so it had to go via Air Mail in order to get there on time. Sometimes my procrastination really costs a lot of money! Oops!

To endless possibilities,