Here's the latest custom quilt I did for one of my customers, Paula. This is entirely freehand with some ruler work. I didn't use a computer for any portion of this quilt. One of the things I get asked all the time is how do I decide what to quilt on a quilt. Some people are under the impression they have to have a plan before they can load a quilt to the frame. It just isn't true. Sometimes the pressure of having it loaded to the frame is enough to get me to decide what to quilt on the top. In this case I started with the brown border. I knew I wanted to play with my new rulers, and I just dove in. You can see me stitching the border in my ruler video. Once I had the triangles stitched, I needed to fill them, and that is where I started thinking about the Victorian Feathers that Karen McTavish taught while she was teaching at the shop. Once that was done, I started thinking about the cornerstones and how to integrate the outside yellow border. Notice I said "started to think." I didn't actually stitch those until the very last. Instead, I put a ribbon candy design in the brown inner star outline. That lead me to consider treating the setting triangles made from strips as one unit. It is always a good idea to pull designs from the outside border inward, so I put Victorian feathers in those triangles. The inner core of the feathers is some pebbles that I decided to use in the middle of the wall hanging to nail down a popped seam. I wanted to really pull the eye out from the center, and straight-line quilting was the best way to add some drama to the middle. Plus, I got to use my new rulers again. :) Can you tell that a lot of this quilt was just me having some happy time with gadgets? Finally, I turned to the outside yellow border and decided to treat it as an extension of the brown border but with a change of thread color. Thanks for looking, and I hope that helped you get in my head a bit about the choices I had to make to finish this top. Paula loved it, and I'm trying to talk her into putting it in the state fair.