Work in progress - Freedom Quilt

Nothing new on the design wall, but I do have something on the frame, the Freedom quilt.  I thought I would show a little about the quilting motif and how I came up with it.  LOL, it's all I got this week :)  I knew I wanted something special for this quilt (you've heard the story fund raiser for my nieces' army unit that just returned from Afghanistan).  But was really at a loss. I do have a 19 in round stencil that I like and haven't used yet.  Now I don't have room for the entire stencil but I did find a good use for part of the stencil.  I did read in a Karen McTavish book that you should look at uses for part of stencil and that's just what I did. Match up the the part that I want.

 Mark the part that I want

 Draw in the missing parts, the arcs needed to be completed and I wanted curved cross hatch in the open space.  The interior of the arcs will be feathers (hmmm surprised?)

 I did this on all the white space between the points.   Here's how it looks on the frame.

Here's the center, I wanted to frame everything with feathers.  For some reason the formal-ness of feathers resonates with me.  I will add McTavishing to the rest to allow the words and the applique to pop. I also feel like when I'm doing McTavishing that I really have to be in a groove for it and that groove can change from day to day so I like to do that when I have enough time to do it all in one sitting, just for consistency sake.

Now I bet you're wondering what I'm going to do with those red and blue points.  Kathleen over at Kathleen Quilts has a Free Motion Friday, you send her your quilt, and she whips up a fancy design.  I really like her ideas for the points and will go with something like that.  I wish I could do ribbon candy, oh how I wish I could.  But I'll figure out some other fill for those spaces, what are the chances that feathers be there?    In the red corner triangles, I'll do some triangle design and some more curved cross hatching.  I think just 1/4 in lines on the blue border and bead board stripes on the rest of the white and red border.  And that should just about do it!

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