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Quilting the Hunter's String Star Quilt

Since my last blog post, I've assembled the book blocks into two quilt tops. 

For the first quilt top, I joined them in the plain old regular way, and for the second, I used the webbing method.  (This wasn't intentional.  I simply didn't remember to web them when I joined the first group.)  

I webbed the blocks for the "Hunter's String Stars" quilt, and that seemed to work well, from what I remember, but with these blocks, I think I found the old-fashioned method easier.  Webbing does have the benefit of allowing you to not worry so much about which piece goes where, once you've joined the blocks in one direction, but it felt more difficult to get blocks properly lined up for perpendicular seams, even though they were webbed into place.  Anyway, webbing might not be best for everyone or every quilt. 

When joining the rows the "old-fashioned" way, I marked each completed strip to help me keep them in the correct order.  You can do this with pins and bits of paper marked with letters or numbers, but this time, I just used my Wonder Clip-style clips in rainbow order.  A red clip for the first strip, then orange, yellow, and so on through the rainbow.  Clipped to the end of the strip, they are easy to see at a glance, and helped me feel confident that everything was going together in the order planned. 

I've also prepared backings for both of those quilts.  Now it's "just" a matter of quilting and binding them. 

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I decided I'd rather quilt the "Hunter's String Stars" quilt than figure out what to do with "Tall Tales".  Since it's so busy, intricate quilting would be wasted.  Something simple seemed a better fit, and something simple was also less intimidating and a good chance to ease my way back into machine quilting after a long break.  

I chose an easy meander in candy pink thread-- a compromise between the reds and the neutrals. 

My meander's not perfect, but it will get the job done!

It's always exciting to see it come together!  I was thinking of trying to film some machine quilting for fun, but before I can do that, I'll have to figure out a way of attaching the phone to the machine.  (Hmm...)

It's going pretty quickly, one of the positive effects of using an easy, larger-scale meander.  It'll be time to find something for the binding before long.