For the 2006 BTQG (Columbia) quilt show, it was decided to do a challenge, and show these quilts in the show. The challenge was to make a quilt which included the block that was designed to represent the guild. It's a star block. I thought it would be fun, but I didn't want to make and use the block repeatedly to make a traditional quilt. I thought about it for several weeks, and decided to make it a star in the sky with rays coming down. I decided make the "rays" from the star to be curved flying geese.

I wanted to make the sky blue rather than black.  I found a dark blue batik in my stash that had stars in it.  How perfect!  I chose a light blue for the background of the rays and the star, so that they would be prominent.

To start with I drew  a square in the upper right hand corner of an 8 1/2 " X 11" paper and then drew curved lines away from that square (which represented the star block). I used several sheets before I got the flow that I wanted.  I then traced my design onto an overhead sheet and projected it larger.  I flipped my image on the overhead, so that I drew the design backwards on the freezer paper on the wall.  Then I put the freezer paper on the table and traced it on tracing paper for a pattern.  I cut the freezer paper to iron to the back of the fabric, and then lay it on the tracing paper pattern. I made hatch marks so I'd know where the adjoining fabrics meet, labeled color, and order of sewing together.

My idea was that the Booneslick star represents the BTQG guild.  The more you volunteer, take workshops, and put into the guild (represented by the two flying geese rows going up), the more you get out of the guild. What you get out of the guild would be represented by the geese that are headed away from the star. I wanted to show as many techniques and fabrics as possible, used by quilters in this quilt.

Techniques in this wall hanging that I used to represent things a quilter could do are: hand and machine piecing, paper-piecing, appli-piecing, hand and machine appliqué, fabric dying and fabric painting, printing photos on fabric, fussy-cutting, hand and machine quilting, large stitch, stitch in the ditch, free-motion quilting, and beading. Quilters use varieties of fabric, such as (top left to right) 1800’s, patriotic, African, I spy (demonstrated by the photo printing), floral (especially for color-wash), hand dyed, oriental, batiks, and hand painted fabrics. To do the photo geese, I printed wallet size pictures of close-ups of some of my quilts and then fussy-cut them.

For the quilting, I stitched in the ditch around all rays and free-motioned the "sky" area. I wanted to make the quilting look like it was radiating out also with maybe some more distant stars, so sketched out some.