Spinning Stars (fixing a quilt top)

In a few weeks, I will be going to the second annual family craft retreat. This has me focused on what I want to bring and what I may have to do to have it ready to work on (so to speak).

One project that I didn't want to just pack up and take was the quilt I'm calling Bright Stars on Black. I did a lot of work on it at the last retreat, getting it to the point that the blocks were assembled, final layout was chosen, and the horizontal rows of the top were sewn.

After I got home, I had to cut a few more pieces from the black background and got the top completely assembled.

I put it on my design wall to take a look and discovered that I had rotated the centres of a few of the blocks. I had carefully positioned them to flow with the light to dark pattern of the quilt and they had gotten rotated when I sewed the rows together.

And there the quilt hung. For quite a while.

When I wanted the design wall for another quilt, I marked all the blocks that I wanted to change and took it off the wall. I put a safety pin on the top right of each block I wanted to fix (purple circle below - obviously the quilt was off the wall and rotated by the time I took the picture). Then I put a safety pin inside the centre at the corner that I wanted to face the top right (green circle).

Some were rotated 90^ and some were 180^ and this way I would be able to keep it straight.

And there the quilt sat for quite a while.

But thinking about bringing this to the retreat and basically putting the top together again did not sit well with me. So I pulled it out and decided that if I wasn't getting around to this at the sewing machine, I would do it by hand. The sewing part would be faster by machine, but the "surgery" part of it was most of the work and would be the same either way.

I pulled it out this week and got to work. One block at a time, I took out the seams around the centre square and rotated the it so the safety pins would line up.

From the back, I pinned the centre of each side to hold the block in place.

Then I pinned one side at a time to be sewn.

Normally in hand stitching you would mark the seam, but I just followed the previous stitching line.

At the middle of each side, four seams intersected. I reinforced the two that I wasn't sewing so that the stitching wouldn't come undone. Normally it would be held in place by the crossing seam, but I didn't trust the hand sewing to do that very well and a lot of them had already "popped" open and had to be resewn.

I followed a path at each intersection to get through it all efficiently without having to start a new thread:

However far the seam had popped open, I just made sure to overlap with the previous stitches about an inch or inch and half each time. I had to do the same thing at each corner.

When I made it around all four sides, I was done!

Next I pressed the seams depending on which direction the seams around it were going. Sometimes the block fit in perfect, but a lot of times I couldn't quite continue the left-right pattern of the pieces around it. (For example, at the bottom left, two adjacent seams are both pressed down.) The good part about hand sewing is that you don't sew down the seam allowances, so I could decide which way to press the seams after the sewing was done.

A final press from the front, and the block was fixed:

I didn't count but there were maybe 6 or 7 blocks that had to be fixed. I got them all done this week, which feels great.

Then I pulled out all the little stars I made for the border.

I have to decide where all of them will go. I'll try to match the rainbow gradient of the centre of the top but I'm sure it won't work out perfectly.

I haven't decided how far I want to get this before the retreat but I did order batting for it. Which means if I get the top done, I have the supplies to quilt it (and finish it?) at the retreat. The place we're going to this year is specifically set up for quilters so there are large tables to use. That would be a lot better for basting then anything I have here. Seems like I should take advantage of that. :)