Australian-ish stars

This quilt is made for my co-worker, Australian obviously, who's husband was ill with leukemia and passed away earlier this year. He was a lovely man--they are all a lovely family--and i hope that this quilt will give them some small comfort.

Green and yellow/gold are not my favorite color combinations but they are the national colors of Australia. the Australian flag also features 7-point stars which is possible to paper-piece but i can't even imagine regular piecing those! i also wanted to finish the quilt sooner than later so i picked an easier block.  here's my interpretation of Australian Stars. i didn't notice that i had misplaced one blocks until i took these pictures--oh well--humble blocks :-)

i didn't give them the quilt 'til Christmas but i had been hoping to make it fast and in the middle of making this quilt, i really felt the slowness of quilting. this isn't a hard block to make, and i actually had pre-cut yellow strips from another quilt, but this seemed to take forever because i had a self-imposed deadline. 

i quilted words onto the quilt which makes me think that would be a really cool quilt pattern for a smallish quilt (this was just barely doable because you have to quilt from left to right (like writing) which would be hard to do on a domestic machine with a queen size-quilt (though if you had a long-arm, that would be really easy i'd think). i wrote out the words, "And these three remain, faith, hope and love. and the greatest of these is love" from 1 Corinthians.

A friend asked if the back was supposed to be a representation of a sewing machine or a house (on the side). and no, it's just leftover scraps :-)  i think this is the last of the Crate & Barrel fabric that i bought close to 20 yrs ago now(!) for a dollar a pound.