Fourth of July Quilt

I finished quilting and binding my lone star quilt. It wasn't on the fourth (more like the seventh, I think), but close enough to call this blue, white and red starry quilt "Fourth of July". I always think patriotic (US) quilts are pretty, but being a Belgian, I can't really make a Belgian version.

Machine quilted and bound

For starters Belgian are not really into flag waving the way Americans seem to be. I'm not going to even try and explain Belgian politics (because, quite frankly, I don't understand them), but decorating my house with the flag would make me appear a royalist/monarchist. But more importantly, our flag is red, yellow and black, and I don't think I'll ever make a red/yellow/black quilt.

Looks lovely in the prairie that our backyard is, after two months of no rain (very, very rare in a Belgian summer!).

I didn't plan to make an American patriotic quilt, I just decided to cut up 6 of my husband old shirts and combine them with an old duvet cover to try this pattern I've been wanting to make for a long time, but didn't want to buy fabric for in case it ended as a big mess. I used a tutorial I found on Pinterest to help me with the cutting and piecing.

A closer look at the machine quilting and the twisted ribbon border. This is before binding and washing. One big advantage of using old fabric: no worries about the red bleeding into the white!

The seams are not well matched at all (no close-ups of unmatched seams!), but the whole thing lies flat and looks good, which is what counts. I then machine quilted it. I went a bit crazy on the diamonds of the star, trying all kind of patterns. I also started doing a dense seashell design on the red background. Then I realized that 1. this would take ages, and 2. the dense quilting makes the quilt stiff, and I wanted to keep the softness of the duvet cover, which has been washed so often it's a bit downy. So I finished with a very open spiral, which took me just a few hours. I did the binding by machine, which is messy (so no close-ups of that either!), but it's finished and I love it!

Done! Finishes at 61' (155 cm) square, ideal for a fourth of July picnic, or a lap quilt.

I really like the twisted ribbon border. I used a tutorial on YouTube for that. I chose not to have it go round the whole star because 1. I wasn't sure I'd have enough dark and light blue fabric, and 2. it saved me a lot of calculating to get the border to match up at the corners it looks really pretty that way!

I have a tall husband, great for holding quilts :-).

 Now I'm going to tackle my Splendid Sampler ... will I finish it in 2018?

The binding is made from the same fabric as the center star.