Written in the stars - Part 1

In follow up to my always secret crafting post the "big reveal" on my most recent project has now come and gone, but because I haven't had a chance to blog-as-I-quilt, I thought I'd just post a little teaser with the online reveal to follow shortly.  So this will be part one of a two-part-post - I promise not to drag it on too long! Remember: good things come to those who wait.

The gift quilt I've been working on came about as a way to celebrate a 10-year "friendiversary"with one of my best pals.  We met at uni when fate rolled the dice and we ended up working in offices next to one another and we became friends in July 2004 when, barely knowing each other, we ended up travelling to and sharing a tent at Hillside Music Festival in Guelph, Canada.

This first friendezvous came about somewhat unplanned, and we awkwardly shared a tent and shivered through the weekend's unexpectedly cold nights, while enjoying food, good music, and a few workshops each day. The rest was written in the stars.

Nine months later we moved to different cities and have never since lived in the same place (or for that matter the same country). Despite this distance we've sustained the friendship, via emails, skype, visits and meeting up in a host of amazing places. So as our 10 year friendiversary approached, I knew I had to find a way to mark the occasion!

Thinking about the theme of "written in the stars" I knew I wanted to create a constellation themed quilt using paper pieced stars and an adapted new york beauty block. I wanted to weave in lots of hidden stories and themes related to our friendship, but I struggled with finding a way to tell the story through the quilt so despite starting work on it with this initial star block in March 2012, the project sat on the back burner until I had my lightbulb moment earlier this year.

My first attempt at a star block.

The slow and sluggish thought process that went on over two years on the back-burner of my mind went something like this:

I love the star and definitely want to work with stars...
... but what can I do with stars, how can I arrange them?
Hmmm.. constellations, I could make it a constellation quilt...
... I wonder if there is a constellation of a unicorn? (we share a joke/affirmation about unicorns) *rushes to google*... Oh yes! There is a monoceros constellation...

"Sidney Hall - Urania's Mirror - Monoceros, Canis Minor, and Atelier Typographique" by Sidney Hall

... but what do I do with this now... and how do I work in the rest of the stories... Am I taking on too much? Can I really tell a story in a quilt?... *excited but totally overwhelmed*

Then one day it hit me: I had reached a point where I knew I wanted to lay out the constellation across the main body of the quilt and had chosen Dan Bennett's Premier Lord collection as my fabrics for the stars... but I was struggling to find fabric in the right deep and dark blue tones to form the contrasting background which I wanted to be the sky. I even searched for constellation fabrics, but struggled to find the right balance of dark, muted blues that I wanted.

So I decided to take the plunge and make my own fabrics via Spoonflower! This allowed me to challenge myself to do some design work and get exactly what I wanted, in the right colours, and gave me a way to literally sew the story of our friendship into the fabric of the quilt.

I designed a pattern of constellations inspired by our friendship, the things we love and the places we have been together and had them printed in three different shades of blue. I also used the placement of the stars in this constellation design, to create a secondary connected constellation fabric (now for sale on Spoonflower!) where the stars were all joined together differently to create a geo-metric fabric.

Here are the three main fabrics:

Here I'm piecing my fabrics alongside Dan Bennett's fabrics

Here you can see the supplementary connected constellation fabric bringing in a geo-metric design that breaks up the more graphic designs of the other fabrics.

And here is your sneak-peek taste of the quilt - my first completed star block ready to go into the quilt. 

I was really happy with the contrast of the colours I'd chosen to print my fabrics in and felt that the designs I made and the scale I printed them at worked really well to achieve the look I was going for.  I wanted the stars to stand out against a very blue background, but didn't want that background to be flat or dull... I think these fabrics work just right to give a defined but not lacklustre backdrop for the stars which are the real focus of the quilt.

 Part two is coming soon!

always secret crafting

Here we go again, I'm writing one of many secret crafting blog posts, only this time I'm writing before the big reveal.

When you quilt, you constantly come up against a tension between the traditional and modern, and although it's a tension I love to embrace and explore in my work, when it comes to quilting and blogging, the tension is quite hard to balance.  Bloggers need things to blog about, but very special, long-term projects don't produce the kind of exciting tidbits and progress updates that suit a blog. Inside you are dying to share all those little things and anecdotes about your work, but because you are working on a gift it is all top secret!

It can also be very hard to remember to share my many thoughts and ideas when I'm working hard and purposefully keeping my head down so as not to arise the suspicion of the soon-to-be recipient of the project I am working on.

So without giving it all away, I've been busy working on a very special project the last few months. Really it is a project that has been 10 years in the making, but I've only been properly working out my ideas in the last six months.

The project has been a tough one that has introduced a few new things into my repertoire:

1. Mastering curves (yikes!)
2. Completing some New York Beauty blocks (double yikes!!)
3. Designing my own fabric (what the what!?!)

Am I up to the challenge? A new york beauty piece from Canoe Ridge Creations

Number three really hits the "traditional meets modern" nail on the head. Get me - I've had a go and digital fabric design! I've designed with illustrator before with my own laser-cut patterns for my Bristol Cityscape coasters and mobile designs, but I felt very overwhelmed at the task of taking my skills further design fabrics.

Fabrics are so much more layered, colourful and complex than simple line drawings, but to ease myself into it, I kept it simple - using my experience with line design to draw some constellations and create some custom fabric. I am desperate to show it off to on the blog, but the design would be a dead giveaway for the person I am creating the quilt for, so for now I'm going to have to be a textual tease.

I ordered my fabric through Spoonflower, but have since discovered that there is a range of fabric printers here in the uk: check out these listings at the Sewing Directory.

Have you designed your own and had any fab or tragic experiences? If yes, I would love to hear about them. Comment or drop me a line or two and I'll work them into my "big reveal" post which should be coming in about two-weeks time!