Finally Quilting!

There are a lot of things I could update here, but let's take on the biggest project making the most progress: my Nocturne Star quilt:

I started the blocks in May, 2016 and had them finished by July. I assembled them into the star and added the border in November and December. I pieced the backing and basted the quilt in June, 2020.

I couldn't start quilting until I had something that would hold the cones of thread I bought for this quilt. I sent a link to Troy for one as a suggestion for my birthday, and he, like any self-respecting maker would do, decided he could make one far better than what was offered for sale.

By February, his creation was ready to use:

It's very pretty and has a very solid (read: heavy) base.

It's working great.

So I could being to quilt. I started by thinking about the center star. It works better to start quilting in the middle of the quilt and it's also the hardest to do so it's nice to get it done first. The first part of the design I settled on was doing ribbon candy inside a diamond frame down the middle of each arm of the star.

I auditioned designs (and practiced the motion of making them) on a piece of glass and a dry erase marker. Then I tried some options to fill in the outside.

And settled on the wave like lines (upper design in the picture below).

Having that settled, I started stitching. In preparation, I had ordered a new foot for my machine that is designed to ride along the edge of a special ruler. (They're both sized so you can't slip and slam your needle into the ruler. Don't try to use just any ruler you have.)

In some ways, it's a little rough. I'm a beginner and the ruler is shorter than the distance to be travelled, so I have to keep moving it while maintaining the straight line. And the stitching is 1/4" from the edge of the ruler so that takes some learning. In some ways, I found it very straight forward and had no qualms about doing my very first ruler work on this special quilt.

Progress was made.

They say consistency of texture is more important that having perfectly placed and symmetrical lines, and I am choosing to believe them. :)

I am very happy that the center lies perfectly flat:

For breaks from that quilting, I sometimes worked on the light squares.

I added borders 1/4" from the edge and filled in an area with various designs based on circles or half-circles.

In general I would have liked to have kept the density of the quilting mostly the same, but in fact the designs do vary quite a bit.

I tried various ways of marking the gaps, including just relying on the markings on the ruler, water soluble pen, and a hera marker. They've all got their pluses and minuses (and I could use more practice with all of them!)

When I couldn't take doing more of the light squares, I started on the outer dark diamond shapes (the "wheel" in the Carpenter Wheel pattern). I auditioned patterns and practiced them on glass again, and ended up with a feather variation.

Something I thought I would never quilt because I wasn't that crazy about feather quilting, and it is deemed "hard". And to be honest, my earlier efforts where pretty bad! I think "modern" feathers are more forgiving and I've learned to go a lot slower and to look ahead. It's helped.

I recently gave a push and finished all of that quilting.

The center area of the light squares was left to do. I was dithering about what to do there. I wanted simple and something fairly dense to make the gaps between the borders pop. I wanted it consistently dense so nothing pictorial. I had settled on traditional crosshatching when a video about the spiraling square came up on my feed.

I decided that was it. It's back to ruler work after a lot of free-motion quilting but this is a little easier since the ruler can span the length of each line.

I've finished it on four of the twelve small squares. I'm not sure I'm going to do the same thing in the larger squares but I have a little time to think about it.

If by some heroic effort and the miracle of nothing going wrong, I have this done in two weeks, I'll be able to enter it in the county fair. If that doesn't happen, my next deadline is mid-August when I'll be traveling to see family. The quilt is destined for my sister and she has been waiting a long time (like since 2016--she had no idea it would be this long!) and I'd like to finally deliver.

Scrappy Trip Around the World Blocks

Remember this project?

This was how many blocks I had done in August.

For the next set, I matched up more strips sets sorted by colour.

My sister had given me this color tool and I finally thought to use the red and green filters to check values so I didn't have to take a hundred pictures and convert them to black and white.

That saved a lot of time!

By the end of December, I had this many blocks:

At this point I was running out of darker fabrics because the blocks use a lot more of it than the lighter fabric. So I thought, maybe I should make some light blocks, like this:

I put it on the wall to see how it would look:

I also wondered about making every other block a light one.

We'll see.

In mid-January, I worked on the heart. I didn't like the dark lines going through the middle.

I made some replacement blocks:

but I still didn't like how it looked. The diagonal lines didn't match up; the red is too thick on those blocks. So I took apart the blocks and reassembled them:

That's better!

I'm not promising this quilt will even have a heart on it, but if it does it will be one I like! ;)

And now the blocks are packed away in a box as I needed to put my Lucy Boston up on the wall. The ideas can marinate while I work on other projects.

Rectangles Squared Quilt Started, Stalled, and Resumed

Back in 2012 I saw a quilt on Ravelry in the show and tell thread, and it has stuck in my mind ever since! I love the pattern of the light and dark and then the added layer of the coloured squares that seem to float behind the dark lines.

Here's a link to the maker's post on Flickr. I did not see that she ever identified the pattern.

But as I looked at it more closely, I realized it was a very simple construction. I've diagrammed it:

You put two rectangles together to make a square. You put four of those units together to make the block. You do need to watch how you assemble them because you'll need half spinning clockwise and half spinning counterclockwise. (I choose 2x4" rectangles but of course you could use any dimension as long as the height finishes twice the width.)

When you put them together you get:

There's another way to get almost the same result with fewer seams to match in assembly:

Here they are side by side:

Except for how the pattern ends at the edges, these two methods produce the same result.

Unless you take into account how the colour falls in the pattern.

On the left is the quilt I admired. The squares of colour don't line up with the black lines and add an extra layer of interest. On the right you can see that the colour is confined inside the black lines and produces a flatter result. You could also say the one on the right is calmer and easy to line up the colours to emphasize the woven look. Neither is better; it just depends on what you enjoy and choose to make.

Who knows what made me decide now was the time for this quilt I have been thinking about since 2012, but I got started in early March.

I decided to make half of the blocks pairing dark blue with light yellows and greens and the other half pairing dark green with light blues and whites. I ended up not having enough fabrics in some of the colours so I didn't strictly follow that colour scheme. I organized everything in these stacking trays that used to be used for eyeglasses orders.

You might be scratching your head because these pieces do not look 2.5"x4.5".

No, they're not. When there was a big enough piece of fabric, I cut the pieces at 2.5"x9", and sewed them together before trimming them to 4.5"x4.5". It makes for a little less matching up while you're sewing.

I sewed a lot of the seams as leaders and enders while finishing my Joy to the World quilt.

That was a lot of improvisational sewing with scraps, so there were a lot of starts and stops perfect for fitting in some leaders and enders.

Once that top was done, however, I did some sewing with this quilt as the main project.

I completed the first few blocks and put them on the design wall to make sure I was pressing so the seams would nest.

It's a good thing I checked because I had to make a correction. If you're thinking of making this pattern, for the blocks turning one way, press the first seams toward the dark and the second seams away from the sewn seam. (This will make sense when you're doing it.) Press the blocks that turn the other way toward the light and toward the seam. Everything will nest that way.

By April 19, I had all the blocks sewn that I could make from the fabric I had.

I have quite a bit of blue so that was no problem. The dark green was not so plentiful. Here I have all 40 blue blocks done and 20 green ones. I put the project on pause then because I was waiting for some green to come from someone I had sent fabric to. (I had a certain design she needed and she agreed to swap.) I never did get anything from her. :( On the other hand, my sister came to the rescue and sent me a nice package with a good selection of greens.

It wasn't quite enough to do all 20 blocks in green, but I had already decided to fill in some of those blocks with blue. (And I snuck in some of that black that I have so much of!)

By mid-May, I had all the blocks done and laid them out on the spare bed.

I want to put them somewhere I can see all of them at once on a flat surface to double check the balance of colour and of lights and darks, but I think this is pretty close.

It's laid out in an 8x10 grid. At 8" a block, the quilt will be about 64x80, a twin size or so. I suppose I could border it, but right now I'm not planning to.

Linking up with:
  -"Oh Scrap" at Quilting is more fun than Housework.
  -Quilting Patchwork and Applique