A Constellation

I may put a project aside and not work on it for a while, but it's rare that I stop thinking about it. If I know what the next steps are, I think through how I'm going to accomplish it. If I'm undecided, then I think about different options. Of course, sometimes during this mulling stage, what I think I'm going to do is replaced by another idea that occurs to me.

I got the bright stars on black quilt back on track in preparation for the family craft retreat in February. I completed the centre section of the top, finished up the border stars and laid it out to figure out where they should go.

But I spent most of the retreat working on my blue and white quilt. So this quilt came home in the same state it left.

Sometime between then and last Thursday, I settled on how I was going to arrange the little stars in the outer border.

The squares of the centre were cut at 5" and finished at 4.5". The stars in the border finish at 5", so I knew they weren't going to line up. I thought all I had to do was calculate the number that would evenly space the stars across the quilt.

Then I thought about spacing them unevenly, closer together on one side gradually moving to further apart on the other. I played with some numbers and found a series that not only fit within my idea, but worked out on even 1/2 or 1/4" measurements.

And boom! put it together:

It was super windy this day. (The beginning of the storm that brought snow the following night.) I clipped small books to the lower corners to keep it down and the wind happy waved them around like nothing.

I moved inside and was able to get a better overall shot:

The effect of the different spacing between the border stars wasn't as noticeable as I hoped, but it's what I could do within my constraints. (For one thing, I didn't want a huge space on the one side - that meant I couldn't make the space very small on the other.) And it's not so bad to have subtle effects in a quilt. :)

The other thing this uneven spacing did was spread out the border stars better. I didn't have quite the variety I needed, but I tried to match them to the colours in the middle of the quilt. I didn't really have enough purple (top left) or blue (bottom right). Putting the wider spacing there kept the blocks of similar colour lined up better. See why I jumped on this idea when it occurred to me? It solved a problem that was nagging at me and I thought I would just have to live with.

Next step for this quilt is layering and quilting. I thought about using a black batting (for my first time) to avoid any noticeable "bearding". (That's where batting is pushed through the fabric and visible on the outside, usually by the stitching.) But I've decided my bigger priority is to keep the bright fabrics bright, and a white batting will have that effect.

I have oodles and oodles of this black fabric, but it's all in smaller pieces (most about 12"x15"). I think I'm going to piece the backing out of it just to use it up and because I don't have a better idea. The binding will be black as well, and it's going to be extra wide to act as a final border around the outside of the quilt.

Hmm...or maybe I should add a black border and then do a bright scrappy piping inside a black binding. I'll have to mull that over for a while...