Written in the stars - Part 2

Now the time has come for the big reveal of my "Written in the Stars" quilt which I posted about last week. It was such a challenging project for me because it brought in some new techniques that I had probably not practiced or mastered enough to start working with! I went from practising one basic new york beauty block, to drawing my own and adapting it to place one of my stars in the middle.

Starting the New York Beauty inspired block

To make matters more complicated I also decided that I wanted inset the block into the piano-key border I set out around the edge of the quilt... and I just about managed it. Sewing with curves in Patchwork is not that new to me, but what I've never done is quilted a patchwork with curves in it.  It was not too much of a struggle to get the patchwork together, but as I quilted through this block the fabric behaved in all kinds of strange ways I'd never expected... pulling and stretching in odd places, and resulting in much unpicking.

New York Beauty with inset start and inset into border of the quilt.

With a few cheats, I just about managed it but I will have to be more patient with curves the next time I tackle them.

I quilted using tight parallel straight lines running across the quilt and tracing some of the stars, and then filled the remaining space with randomly angled intersecting lines.  Not my neatest quilting job, but I was happy with the overall effect.

And for the finished product? My hope is that you'll be inspired by the quilt, but forgive my photo composition! Sadly, I live in a small urban flat and don't have fields of wheat or rolling green hills to use as a backdrop for my quilts: Instead you get a crowded floor space between an ikea desk and a laundry rack and my very dingy garden!

But here it is:

And my wonderful friend (of 10 years now!) showing it off her gift.  Not the greatest photo, but I hope it shows off the overall look. The lighting makes the puckering look a bit worse than it was, but it does at least show off the mix of textures between the tight straight line quilting and the more random lines that run through the rest of the quilt. Plus the smile on her face is the most important thing to me!

Excited to see what the next 10 years brings our way!