Snowball

Such a lovely Amish quilt!  Here's a quilt with all the criteria needed to satisfy any Amish quilt collectors:

Colors are bold.  It is wool.  Piecing is precise.  Quilting is prominent.  Stitches are teensy.

It is quite large, and is backed with a grey striped flannel.

There were some holes here and there.  I carefully tucked a slightly larger piece of fabric inside each hole and then secured the edges with couching stitches.  The practical benefit is to keep the batting from popping out.  The visual benefit is to not have white spots of batting distracting from the color and design.  I did not actually patch these areas for two reasons - one was to not cover up the original and wonderful quilting, and the other was not finding great color matches for the wools anyway.  You may think the colors look pretty good in this photo, but that's because I could use such small pieces.  You'll just have to take my word for it.

One octagon was missing about 1/4 of its fabric.  I did patch that whole shape and then re-quilted.  To transfer the feather wreath design:  I traced the wreath, then cut around the edge of the wreath and cut out the center hole.  I basted the paper pattern in place.  Then I stitched along the edges of the paper.  I carefully cut the lines between the feathers, one at a time as I progressed.

It's really a beauty, isn't it?  That interplay between the murky octagons and brilliant red-orange squares is stunning.  To my eyes, maybe because of the shadows created by the quilting, it seems like the octagons are floating over a red-orange field.  But color theory would say that the brighter color would move forward.  This makes for a feeling of movement.  Lots of movement for such an otherwise chunky and stable design.