Lisa, your quilting is beautiful. I had thought about quilting mine, but chickened out and sent it out to be done. Can't wait to get it back. After enlarging the designs to make a queen quilt, I decided I didn't need another bed quilt so ended up just making the center (on point) and the border of blocks and eliminating the large outside border. It will hang on the wall above my bed.
I will be working again along with the newest group as I have been asked to chair a committee to make and sell the raffle quilt for our 2014 quilt show here in Wickenburg AZ and have decided that AOTH would be an awesome raffle quilt. I have ordered navy kona cotton to use as the background and will be cutting blocks as soon as it gets here. I don't know how many volunteers I am going to get from our group to applique the blocks, but I'm hoping I'll get enough that we'll each only have to do 3 or 4 blocks. Need to get these blocks done so that it can be quilted next fall. We sell chances for the raffle quilt for a full year before the quilt show.
I learned something from working on my own quilt last year. I had enlarged the pattern by 142% for a 10" block, but that really doesn't leave much room between the designs for quilting. For this new quilt I plan on using 10" blocks again, but only enlarging the pattern to be 8", thereby leaving 1" on each side of each block for quilting, so that where 2 blocks are sewn together there is 2" to quilt. I think I will like that a lot better.
As to a prior question about thread for applique, I bought a couple of the Superior Masterpiece thread bobbin donuts, each of which is filled with different colors of thread. That way I had a large supply of different colors of thread for the applique and didn't have to buy large spools of thread that I might not use in the future.
Looking forward to working along with you guys who are just starting this. It's an awesome quilt and I really enjoyed making the one I did last year.