Finished the Birds quilt ...

For the past 3 weeks or so I've been working on another quilt for a customer, one that has given me lots to do in the past few years.  She makes lovely quilts, they're always so much fun to quilt.  

This one is from a book called Birds of a Feather.  It's a sampler quilt with some blocks in applique with birds and flowers, leaves, pears, all kinds of neat stuff, and every here and there is a traditional pieced block like 4-patch or flying geese.  She liked the way they had done the quilting on many of the blocks as shown in the book and had very conveniently loaned me the book with sticky notes posted here and there.   

While I was quilting, I'd get to a particular block, look it up in the book to see if she'd left any notes, then quilt it.   Easy schmeezy!  I didn't have good light to get a picture of the whole quilt but I did get some pics of a few areas here and there on it to show the quilting.

The top picture shown here is typical of the appliqued blocks with a few of the traditional ones around it.  I quilted random leaf shapes in the background of the blocks, in the ditch around the applique, then feathers in the birds' wings, outlines in the leaves and vases.  The half-square-triangles have a feathered design quilted in them, then there's a diagonal cross-hatch in the 4-patch blocks above.

The middle picture shows another applique block with the leaves and feathers, then just a 1/4" outline in the hourglass blocks on the left.  The border was all quilted with diagonal lines, all 4 corners look like this.

In order to get the corners to all match, so I wouldn't end up with two opposite funky corners (if you draw it out in your mind you'll see what I mean), I had to reverse directions halfway around the border on each side so the diagonal lines would go on the right angle and point towards the corner.  More birds with feathered wings and leaves behind them.