Oh my stars

 

I've had a charm pack from Laundry Basket Quilts lying around for a while that I wasn't 100% sure what to do with.  I was interested in the Oh My Stars pattern by Pat Sloan, but that took two charm packs.  So when she showed a version that took one pack, I figured that was what I would do.

Looking through my fabric stash, I found some coordinating fabric I had for a while, and some other fabric I'd picked up at a destash last year. So I got to it, arranging the charm squares on the floor near the sewing machine in an order I liked, and sewing them back together as soon as I could before the cat rearranged them.

The centre of the top was together pretty quickly, but then I packed it away for a bit while I worked on something else. I pulled it out again later to put on the borders, but then packed it up again.

When it was finally time to think about quilting, I decided to get a bit experimental. I'd seen a YouTube video about glue basting a quilt instead of pinning and thought I'd give it a go. You had to make sure to wash the quilt and glue out after, but that was fine with me. It seemed to work fine, and I might give it a go again - I've still got plenty of glue.

I also got a little experimental with the quilting. I just did some straight lines for the stars and skinny borders, then went for an all over flower type design for the blocks which was a bit of fun. However, for the first time, I did a partial feather design in the wider border, which I'm fairly happy with. I'll give another feather design a go sometime.

Lastly, instead of doing my usual binding with 2.5 inch strips of fabric, I decided to have wider binding, and started with 3.25 inch fabric. The resulting binding is something between a half and three quarters of an inch, which is nice for a change, and definitely easier to add on.  But the skinnier binding does use up less fabric.

I had fun with this one as I really didn't have any plans or expectations for how it would turn out or whether what I was trying would work out.  The quilt ended up about 50.5 x 60 inches, which is alright.

Please excuse the creases in the overhead photo below.  The quilt was sitting in my car for almost two weeks waiting for a sunny, not rainy, not too windy day out of work hours when I didn't already have commitments.  The sun was finally shining as I left work today, so I detoured past the old tea pavilion at the very large park across the road.

Location: Perth WA, Australia

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Aves 2018 - Week 6

Image
This year I thought I would take on a quilting challenge, so I signed up for Aves , a Block of the Week quilt by Kathryn Kerr of Green Avenue Quilts . Every Sunday starting 21 January 2018, I receive the instructions to complete one block for the quilt. The plan is to complete the current block before the next one is released. Week 6 The block for week 6 looked easy peasy, but knowing where how it fit in with the rest of the quilt, I had a feeling it might be the last straightforward one for a while. I did a little bit every night, and was finished by Wednesday evening. During the process, I couldn't figure out why some of my squares were not working out quite to the size I expected, and were running a little small.  I did a test on my scant quarter inch, sewing a number of tiny pieces together and seeing the size of the strip I ended up with, but there were no issues there.  I'm now thinking it was a particular small ruler I was using, so I've put it away and will ...
Read more

Aves All Done

Image
The first finish of the year is actually the quilt that started this blog.  Yep, I finally got around to quilting it. Back in 2018 I thought I would take on a quilting challenge, so I signed up for  Aves , a Block of the Week quilt by Kathryn Kerr .  For 45 consecutive Sundays, I receive the instructions to complete one block for the quilt and do a bit of construction on the way. For the past five years the quilt top has been sitting in my spare wardrobe, along with a pieced backing and enough binding to go around.  But I have not quilted it because it was huge and heavy, and I had no idea what to quilt.  Until one night last year.  I couldn't sleep, so I was lying in bed thinking about quilts as usual and suddenly I had an idea.  Concentric circles. Next morning I pulled the top out, had a look and a think and figured it would work. Because the top was so heavy (given there are so many bits of small fabric), I decided to only put enough wadding b...
Read more

Aunt Blanche's blocks

Image
  A while back grandma gave me some blocks that Aunt Blanche had put together at some point.  I had no idea what to do with them.  There wasn't enough to make a quilt from, so I thought about a table runner.  That didn't seem to work either so there they sat for a very long time. I pulled them out again earlier this year, probably after watching too many Youtube quilt videos, and decided to use the free version of PreQuilt to help me figure out what to do with the blocks.  After some messing around I came up with a layout that made a small lap size quilt.  The layout used the nine similar blocks and a lot of negative space.  And I had just the right Liberty fabric I'd picked up from the usual place when they were having a sale.  With so few pieces, this was the quickest and lightest quilt I had put together in a while.  So I took the opportunity to piece it on the antique Singer. There were three other blocks in the collection, but they were...
Read more