Star Spangled Banner Finished

Hi all -

I have my first finish of the year! Yea! Here it is, the quilt I'm making for the Kansas City Hospice House:

Actually, I finished the quilt a week or so ago, but I wanted to wait until I finished the pattern and got it uploaded to Craftsy before sharing it with you. This is my first pattern and I think I did a pretty good job on it. If interested, you can purchase the pattern here. (Shameless self promotion....)

Here is what the full quilt looks like:

I'm especially pleased with the quilting. For the white strips, I just echoed the edges of the strips so the centers would pop; for the red stripes, I also echoed the edges but filled the center with ribbon candy. I think that gives some wonderful texture. To finish the top area, I quilted in the final red stripe so we got the correct number of strips, then filled the top area with straight lines mirroring the chevrons:

 In the blue, I just used a spiral background fill that I learned from Angela Walters. The stars have three lines of quilting echoing the shape and providing extra security when washing:

I usually like to use a backing that shows the quilting, but I found this fabric that I thought was perfect for a patriotic quilt so you can't see the quilting:

The final feature of this quilt is a two-color binding that matches up with the piecing perfectly. When trying to decide on the binding fabric, I didn't like how the red or blue alone would blend on one side of the quilt and stick out on the other, so I figured out how to use them both. Here's one of the transition points:

I was really excited with how well these turned out and my next blog post will be a tutorial on how I did it.

Until then, here's a little kitty yin-yang for you to enjoy:

Aren't they the cutest?

Nancy