"Yellow Star on Blue" Wall Hanging

Last time I talked about this project was April when I completed the top and basted the layers together. Then I left it hanging on the display board.

I really can't remember over what time period I worked on the quilting, but by January 7 of this year, I had the center portion quilted:

.

I marked all of the lines with disappearing ink and free motion quilted it.

I repeated the back and forth lines on the outside of the star in the center as well, except I made the lines wavy to match what was going on with the fabrics. (This piecing was an improv technique learned at the class where I originally made the center star.)

I can't say I think it looks great. Now I know.

In the yellow part, I did curves from point to point that are similar to what was done in the yellow areas of the wall hanging I have been trying to match.

The only thing left to quilt was the outside border, which would be done in a "square in a square" pattern. I thought if I put the binding on first, I could make sure the points lined up exactly on the edge. But I didn't want to tackle the binding because it included piping and that was just a step to far at that point. So it was left hanging again.

Two things pushed me to pick it back up:

1. It was listed on my UFO (UnFinished Object) list in the Ravelry quilting group. I hadn't participated in the UFO Club in the summer and fall, but signed up again in January for the winter quarter, and even signed up for the "send" group. That means, if I finish a project, people would send me a FQ!! (FQ=fat quarter, a quarter yard of fabric. Well, never mind, it's fabric!) One member went so far as to tell me she had one that she had been saving for me--she knows I like elephants so I have reason to believe I'm going to like that one! ;)

2. Joy at the Joyful Quilter issued a "Table Scraps Challenge", with extra kudos for including the Rainbow Scrap Challenge colour of the month. Although I was making this project as a wall hanging, it could easily double as a table topper. And the colour for February was yellow!

Last week, I pulled this star off of the board and took a look at what it needed. Fortunately I had cut all the remaining pieces because without them, I would not have remembered my plan at all. I chose to use blue piping instead of yellow, in part because I just didn't have any more of the bright glaring yellow that I had used on the other one.

I pulled out my Piping Hot Binding book and tool and applied four strips of piping around the edge in pretty short order.

Then I realized the difficulty with quilting the outside border. The piping is designed to lift up--it's only sewn on one side. So do I line the points up with what was visible? Do I line them up with the actual seam (which was under the piping)? Further complicating it was that if I pulled the piping far enough back to not cover any of the points, the edge of the quilt wasn't going to be caught up in the binding seam. /big sigh

I just did the best I could, balancing the need to capture the raw edge and not covering up too much of the little squares.

After that was done, I trimmed the quilt and applied the first two sides of the binding. Then, thankfully, I tried to fold the binding over the edge to see how it would look...it was too small! It also happened that the binding lined up so that a seam would land exactly at a corner--not good! Obviously, I was going to have to remove it and try again.

On another day, I gave my seam ripper a workout and removed the binding. I trimmed the quilt with the smaller setting on the tool and started again, making sure to shift where I placed the binding! No seams landed at the corners and all was good.

I gave myself one more problem before I finished...when I cut the binding to attach the end to the beginning, I measured perfectly and then cut the angle the wrong way. So instead of the two edges aligning,

they made a big empty triangle. 

Did I throw up my hands and walk away? No, I did not. I sewed in a short piece of binding to fill in the gap, thus giving myself more opportunities to practice the skill.

Then it was done. Oh wait. No. I had to sew the binding to the back, which I did by hand. That was done during daylight hours considering it was dark blue thread on busy fabric.

As with the first wall hanging, I sewed two triangles on the top corners for hanging:

You slide the ends of a dowel under the triangles and it holds the quilt up. On smaller pieces, it's a nice way to avoid having to do a hanging sleeve along the entire top edge.

And here are the two pieces together:

I have to admit I didn't really like how the blue and yellow in the outside border lined up on the two of them. (I have no memory if that was a conscious choice or if that's just the way it turned out.)

But when I displayed them side by side, I liked it a lot more:

There were several design things that went wrong on this latest piece. Some I corrected and some I left. Now that's it's finished, I think it would have been a stronger piece and a better match to the first if the light blue area around the star was filled in with dark blue squares instead. But when I made the original block,

I didn't know this was what I was going to be doing with it! :)

It was an interesting challenge to try and make a match to the first piece a few years later. I still had some of the same fabrics, but had to find substitutes for others. Some things I had to piece together to have enough (like the backing) and other things were solved by a combination--did you notice the narrow yellow border is different on the second one? I had to find a second fabric to have enough to go all the way around. I ended up piecing the fabrics together so that the original is in the  middle of each side and the new fabric is in the corners. (You can see it in the detail pictures of the piping above.)

Linking up with the Joyful Quilter February Table Scraps Runner/Topper Challenge, and

Quilting is more fun than Housework Oh Scrap!

Project summary

Started: Center block made June 21, 2018; wall hanging started February 23, 2020

Finished: February 19, 2021

Size: 18"x18"

Pattern: my own

Material: 100% scraps, almost all cotton quilting fabrics

Cotton batting.

Walking foot and free motion quilting on my Viking Sapphire.

All blog posts about this wall hanging: link

Desk Warming Gift

I finished a little something.

We are in the process of moving our "office" desks from the dining room up to our bedroom, now that the bedroom is largely finished.

Troy recently finished his desk top (which he mounts on a pair of file cabinets). When he first sat down at it, he commented that he is going to need a mug rug to protect the desk surface.

Well, that is something I can take care of making! A few days later, I was in the mood for a small project that I could finish in short order and got to it.

I knew I had some leftover half-square triangles (HSTs) from my Merrily Christmas quilt top:

I had a bag of brown/tan HSTs and a bag with the green and red ones. I found the brown ones first, so those are what I used. And happily, that meant they were much less Christmas themed as well!

I pulled out all the HSTs from the bag and played with them until I had an arrangement I liked. Then sewed it together like a simple 16-patch.

I layered it with a layer of cotton batting on top (to absorb any moisture) and then a layer of wool batting on the bottom (to keep the moisture from soaking through). That's the theory anyway; I'll let you know if it works!

I backed it with some of my never ending supply of black leftovers and quilted it in echoed mitered corners.

My machine wasn't too happy with the thickness (or at least, that's what I assume it was). There were some flubbed stitches that you can see on the back.

I used the edge of the pressure foot to guide the distance between the lines and that happened to also cause the lines to fall along the seam lines. I had considered ahead of time whether to do the calculations to make this happen but decided to leave it to fate. And it worked out that way anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of pressure feet design them that way. (For example, making the edge of the foot 1/4" from the needle position would mean that it would line up with almost all blocks as they are general sized every 1/2".)

That is as far as I got the first afternoon. The next day I took the time to make binding from a piece of grey fabric I bought for my Lucy Boston project but didn't use. There wasn't enough for a double binding, so I just used a single thickness. It's not like this edge is going to get a lot of wear or have to stand up to much use.

I stitched it to the back so that the part that folded over to the front would be longer. Then when I stitched it by machine on the front, the stitching ran beside, but not over, the binding in the back.

I don't usually enjoy stitching binding by machine and am not usually happy with the result. (Those two things just might be related!) But for this one, I hand basted all the way around the front, right next to the fold. Then I could stitch just inside that stitching and nothing had a chance to shift or move. This isn't practical for a large quilt, but it was worth it to me for this project.

So now Troy has a mug rug for his desk, and since he's getting close to finishing my desktop, I have to start thinking about mine! I think I'll go look for those green and red leftover HSTs, Christmas themed or not...

Merry Christmas!

This is the first year I managed to hang the star I knit in 2009 above the tree.

It's a fun way to do it, and a lot better than just sitting it in the top of the tree as I've done the last few years.

A very merry Christmas to you all!

Merry Christmas!

The big day has arrived. I'm glad when Christmas falls on a Sunday because I grew up going to church on Christmas morning and my current church doesn't have services on Christmas morning...except when it's a Sunday. It doesn't feel like Christmas if I don't go to church first thing.

You may recall that I made a cover for our communion table to be used throughout advent.

When we last saw it, it looked something like this:

Each week of advent, another piece was added.

This morning, not only was the final center piece added, but they were all turned around to reveal an appliqued star:

I had to work to make it big enough to make an impact from the front of the sanctuary, but I think it came out ok.

For those of you who want the details, I applied the star with Steam-a-Seam double-sided fusible adhesive and then zig zagged the edges with a variegated rayon thread. (I used purple in the bobbin so the sewing isn't very obvious from the plain side.)

I didn't want to "outline" the edges of the strips so I left them raw. I thought zig zagging there would be too distracting as it goes up the middle of a ray. If the edges start to ravel, I can always zig zag them later.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, I hope you have a good day.

Happy Holidays!

Quilts as Postcards

Have you heard of the craze of making mini quilts and sending them as postcards? People love them because they can finish them in an afternoon and they make a very fun surprise to send to someone in the mail.

I made my first one last year shortly before Christmas and was inspired by some fabric triangles my sister sent me to show me the fabrics she was using in a quilt. Her bright scrappy and white quilt turned out wonderful and the little fabric bits she sent me were irresistible. That inspiration turned into the following postcard:

Lessons learned from that postcard were 1. shortcuts can be fun (I would normally want to piece a pinwheel, but just slapping down some half-square triangles worked and was much easier); 2. you really do need to stick down applique pieces or they will slide around; and 3. more stabilizer is better, especially with the heavy sewing I needed for the lettering.

Then I struggled with what to do with it; I mean, obviously I couldn't make one for everyone on my Christmas card list! So I settled on this plan: I would send the postcard to my sister, for indeed she had inspired me to make it, and then I would take a picture of it to use in the general Christmas card I sent out to the rest of the list.


I "borrowed" a friend's Christmas tree and got this picture of my postcard sitting in it:

and I then used the picture in a Christmas postcard:
I was happy with the solution. I really didn't want to send a postcard with just my mug on it because what does that say about Christmas? Not much. So this way I got a Christmas message, and could also pass along a personal picture which does say something about my life. (Like in this case, "I cut a lot of wood this year!")

So this year, the same question: what to do for a Christmas card? A friend had given me some gold lame scraps and I had some nice leftover fabric from my Hawaiian Star quilt sitting on my desk. This was the leftover pieces from the fabric I'm only using the dark parts of. And it grew on me that I wanted to do a star. There are so many quilt options for stars and I settled on a simple Sawtooth Star:
I had some gold thread already as well, so it was perfect for the quilting. I started in the center and just sewed outward in a gentle arcs. I wanted to imitate the general shape of a galaxy (as seen from very far away, obviously).

The main thing learned from this postcard was that you really do need to have a very stiff layer in the middle (this one isn't stiff enough to mail on its own). And gold lame is very hard to photograph.

And then I took a picture of the postcard sitting in the evergreen bush in my front yard and made that the front of the card.

The inside of the card has a small family pic printed on the upper half and the quote,

"We saw his star in the east

and have come to worship him."

printed in the usual place. I had it all printed up at WalMart.com and they turned out pretty good. I hope to have them all out by tomorrow. (Phew!) I had Troy write up this year's letter which was a load off my mind.

So who's getting the "real" card this year? Sorry...I'm keeping that secret so it won't spoil the surprise when they get it!

Good luck with your Christmas/Holiday/Seasonal cards this year...give them some thought and I'm sure the recipients will appreciate it.

All for now,

christina