Here's the fifth quilt I've made, after a long, long, long delay. It is about 61 inches by 61 inches, the first one big enough to be called a full size quilt.

I discovered that the magnetic attraction between a quilt and a playful cat increases with the quilt's size. Mischief, who considers himself the star of the household, has been seizing every opportunity to sleep on the quilt, especially when I tried to work on it. He inspired the quilt, in fact. The blue fabric in the star blocks has playful dogs and cats romping with their toys. I alternated them with solid green rectangles decorated with graceful scrolls spangled with red hearts from the same fabric as the smaller red stars in the center of the big blocks and the in smaller blocks connecting the rectangles.

The quilting is simple outlining next to the seams to make the stars stand out. The red stars are outlined to stand above the blue outer stars, and the white background pieces are outlined to emphasize the stars further. The scrolls are outlined to define them on the quilt back, since they are chain stitch embroidery done before piecing the quilt. The outlining goes around their little hearts to make them nicely plump above the background.

I decided not to quilt a background pattern on the rectangles partly because the scrolls were so delicate that they would have been obscured and partly because my piecing wasn't exact enough to be enhanced by the diagonal pattern I had originally considered. I'm going to have to improve my piecing before I can fit a precise grid neatly into a block. The scroll outline was enough to hold the batting in place well without needing more than an additional line of quilting just outside the edge of the outside scroll rectangles next to the binding seam.