Star of Bethlehem

 

A few years ago, one of my nieces asked for a Christmas quilt. I had found a jelly roll lone star quilt pattern online and saved it for future use. (I can no longer find it online, so I can't link to it). Back when Craftsy/Bluprint was still selling fabric, I purchased this jelly roll and coordinating fabric. The pattern didn't make a quilt as big as I wanted, so I included enough fabric to add the border.
The pattern was kind of complicated, especially since the designer was using a totally different jelly roll from mine. So I had to choose which colour in my jelly roll would best coordinate in which places. If the pattern had actually given a "map" of where each colour would end up in the design, I might have made a different choice or two. As it was, all I knew was that I was sewing offset jelly roll strips together in sets and then cutting diamonds from them, then assembling them into bigger diamonds, and so on. Once I'd sewn the strips together and cut the diamonds out, it was really too late to make changes. But it wasn't until then that I realized I would have liked to. But I wasn't about to start ripping out bias seams... And I'm still very happy with the results.
Anyway, I pulled this out to work on as my "Christmas in July" project. I got the whole quilt top done, but figured I should do some custom quilting on this quilt, with all of that negative space. So, I had to sit on that idea for a while. 
I tried asking in an online longarm group for ideas, and got some good ones. But I had to get my courage up to actually do it. I'm not a custom quilter. I'm a panto quilter and pantographs are my comfort zone. And since I could mail this quilt for free on a Tuesday in October (see my previous post, Butterflies and Blooms), it needed to be finished before the last Tuesday in the month. And I didn't want to rush if I was going to attempt custom quilting. So, yes, I used a pantograph. Initially, I was going to use a star pantograph, but when I flipped to the "Sky" section in my topical index of pantographs, Aurora was the first one in the list. And when I looked at that pantograph, I knew it was perfect. 

And I don't regret not doing custom quilting. Someday, maybe when I'm caught up on all the family quilts, and can just play around, I will do some custom quilting. But for now, I'll mostly stick with pantographs.