Blogger’s Quilt Festival

It’s that time of the year again….It’s the blogger quilt festival!  It’s a great chance to see MANY great quilts and to visit blogs that I regularly read and get introduced to new bloggers.  If you are new to Jo’s Country Junction, WELCOME!

The festival is sponsored by Amy over at Amy’s Creative Side.

If you are a regular reader of my blog you may recognize this quilt as my Maverick Star quilt.

Last fall, I discovered Quiltville and Bonnie Hunter. I spent days on the website poking and seeing all there was to see. Two things popped out for me…the concept of leaders and enders and the Maverick Star tutorial. I immediately started making maverick stars as my leader and ender project… and, after all my efforts, I have this to show….

I learned a lot when making this quilt. I learned that a speaker phone can be a necessity for quilting….especially if your college kids call you all the time like mine do. (You’ll have to follow the link to my website to understand that!)

I also learned that in some quilts…anything goes! See the background prints…some are cream. Some are white-white. Some, I don’t even know what I was thinking when I bought them. Check out that background fabric with the orange flowers on it…Yaowza!
The quilt is PERFECT if you’re trying to get rid of ugly fabric. The fabrics just all blend and what was once ugly just blends into something interesting. I got rid of SO many fabrics that I didn’t really like anymore or didn’t work very well with the fabrics I have.

Just in case you want to make your own quilt, let me give you some specifics. In Bonnie’s tutorial, she suggests trimming your maverick stars down to 5″ blocks and making them wonky. I didn’t do that. I left mine as they were. Once all my stars were made, I made secondary stars as part of the sashing. The quilt is 11 stars across by 11 down and sashing separates each star. There is a plain scrapped together border one row wide made from 2 1/2″ background pieces.

My quilt ended up being 88″ x 88″. I used a dark colored binding which really brings out the dark colored fabrics in the stars. The back is pieced together using fabric from my stash and additional maverick stars.

I admit, that this project ended up being more than a leader andender project. After I got the 120 blocks sewn leader and enderstyle, I took a few nights and worked on the sashing as a regular project. I REALLY wanted to see how it was going to look and just wasn’t patient enough to continue on the leader and ender mode.

I am TOTALLY a leader and ender girl now!  I am addicted.