Longarm quilt #85: Warren's Flag - a beautiful collaboration

I gave you a sneak peak of this quilt in progress back on 8/31/13 - when it looked like this:

August 31

Originally my deadline to finish the quilt was January 2014, but my DH wanted to give it to his friend early so it changed to October 26 – aeeeiiii! But I got it done in time.

September 22

I’m really proud of our collaboration. Hubby picked a flag picture that he liked, then I enlarged it and traced the giant pieces onto freezer paper (that was back in June 2013).

I wanted to try curved piecing for this (a first) and it worked fairly well, but there were some tricky areas.  I’d probably just do raw edge appliqué next time because of the steep curves. DH also came up with the idea of the Vietnam service ribbon for the borders. The white stars are fused raw edge appliqué and the star corners are appliqué machine embroidery. After it was bound, I added gold cording all around the edge. (helpful hint: preshrink any trims!)

Piecing the border & embroidering the corner stars

Before quilting

Warren was a helicopter gunner in Vietnam so DH drew the helicopter that I used for the quilting. I moved my laser light to the front of the longarm, pinned the drawing on the quilt to the right of the machine head and moved it across the top as I quilted each helicopter.

I was really unsure of thread color and used Omni Light Sage with a matching So Fine Bobbin. I did SID on all the flag pieces and around the stars so there’s a lot of backtracking on the back. A tan backing might have been better.

Here's the back showing the helicopter quilting

What do you think? Different backing or different thread??

What I’d do different: raw edge appliqué for steep curves, red bias tape instead of tiny piecing on borders. A different thread color or a different backing color.

Overall, I’m very proud and happy with this quilt and want to do more flags in the future. I’ve done several Quilts of Valor qovf.org in the past and this would be a fun project for this wonderful organization.