Quilty Pleasures Wednesday: American Star Quilt

This was one of my early quilts, started in January 2005 at a class about settings taught by Sharyn Craig.  I used Sharyn's book Great Sets as a reference for the quilt, the first one I made without any particular pattern. I began with a few star blocks and that was it. We had to do MATH (geometry, in particular) in order to draft the triangular settings for this quilt, which was a challenge.

I decided to make a patriotic red, white and blue quilt because a co-worker's son had recently been killed in Iraq and I couldn't stop thinking about the grieving mother wearing her plastic badge with the number of war dead, the number changing almost every day.  Here is a 2008 interview with the mom, Vickie Castro, who continues to be active in the Gold Star Mothers' organization.

 The custom quilting was by Lajuan Cotton of Cotton Creations, from Corona, CA, and is amazing for a number of reasons, among them the fact that I wasn't too good at matching seams, yet she soldiered on, using a variety of quilting motifs to really make this quilt look good.

Enjoy your 4th of July and let's get our young men and women in the Armed Forces overseas back home, like right now.