Carrie's applique quilt

Carrie brought me this amazing applique quilt that she was planning on entering in the upcoming Forsyth Quilters and Piecers Guild Quilt Show. She wanted something special for this one. I spent a lot of time looking at this one before quilting. Carrie sent me quite a few Pinterest pins of ideas and I set to work.

 This quilt was so much fun to quilt, especially because each block is different and there is plenty of variety. Not to mention that Carrie's applique is perfect.

This block was easy to decide. Feathers, feathers, feathers.

The basket blocks are matching, with curved cross hatching on the baskets.

The stars gave me a bit of trouble. They still looked a little puffy after McTavishing the background, so Carrie gave me the idea to do the stars with the crossed lines.

The nine patch was a challenge as well. I wanted to do something a little bit different. Carrie liked the square theme and I filled in the sides with feathers.

I quilted feathers on the geese and threw some leafy vines on the applique backgrounds. All the applique pieces are outlined.

The larger flowers and leaves were a bit puffy after quilting, so they got some decorative quilting to accent them.

I had enough room on the large applique block to quilt vines on each side and I love, love, love how the outer border turned out. Carrie didn't really want traditional feathers, but suggested using the backing fabric as inspiration. Of course now I realize I didn't take a pic of the back, but it had a lot of different swirly flower and paisley designs that I used to create the border.

I stitched a traditional spine as if I were going to quilt feathers and then alternated 4 different floral motifs across the border.

I quilted these loopy swirls in place of feathers.

Then I went around the entire border one more time to quilt the little spikes in between the loops.

When it was all done, I looked it over and felt like I had just quilted a sampler. A little bit of all different kinds of designs. So much fun!

Thanks so much Carrie!