Commentary about works in progress, design & creativity
Yes, the Frosted Stars has been finished for a long time. I went looking for a photo and realized I had never taken one. So, cheap date as it may be, here is the finished item! YAY! Another completed project.
This quilt is growing on me. I think it is the turquoise.
The last time you saw this quilt was after Thanksgiving.
Last night I finished the binding while watching Oceans 12 and now it is ready to go off to its new home. I am not ready for it to go off yet, because I will wait for the end of the school and give it then. I decided I am going to go and get several large gift bags (no, I am not making them, though I probably should) and just start filling them up with quilts and Teacher Pillows. The thought of having a bunch of gifts to wrap at the end of the year makes me crazy.
I have to admit that I have never gotten over the feeling that the quilting will ruin the look of my piecing. It turns out that I am really pleased with the quilting. Colleen did more feathers, which I love. She also paid special attention to the various borders – no all over patterns for me. The other thing that is making the finishing of these various quilts much easier is giving her the binding and having her sew it on. I can just bring it home and start working on the binding right away. Wonderful.
I decided that I should take a photo of the back, so I asked my quilt holder to turn the quilt around. You get a lovely view of the back:
I like using the leftover fabric as the back, as I have said before. I prefer to use larger pieces, as I discussed when I was talking about making the back for FOTY 2010. Two panels were included in this group of fabrics. I thought it was a little odd looking, but one of them works for the back.
I made this top from the leftovers of the Frosted Stars. Looking at it in the picture I like it as is. However, I do think that the border is a bit too thin and will get distorted in the quilting process. As a result, I have been looking at borders.
I have enough of the blue fabric to go around the whole piece (but not to show the whole to you).What do you think?
Alternatively, I can go with blue and white. I kind of like the blue and white, but one of the boys pointed out that the white disappears next to the blue. I think the values are similar.
My other idea was to put a bit of a piping border in orange in and then add another red border. I didn’t have time to set that up so you could see what it looked like. Perhaps I will.
This weekend was kind of a sewing bonanza. I think I spent about 10 hours at the machine on Saturday, and another 6 or so on Sunday sewing like a crazed woman. The result is two backs and a top, a journal cover, a repaired bag and parts of the Frosted Stars Leftovers quilt. The Frosted Stars top is above. I changed some of Charlie Scott’s pattern, as I have mentioned.
The quilt top, without the final turquoise border is all on the bias and I just don’t believe in giving a quilt to a quilter with a bias edge border. Yes, I am going to send this out to be quilted. I just want this quilt to stay relatively square and adding another border was required. I don’t know why a pattern designer would finish off a quilt with a bias border. Perhaps it is some complicated part of a learning experience of which I am unaware.
I spent a good portion of my day off Wednesday piecing the sashing and the borders on to the star blocks. As you can see, I didn’t quite finish, but I am moving forward.
I made good progress on the Frosted Star quilt over the weekend. Not as much as I would have liked, but I never make as much progress as I would like!
I finished the border piecing for the Frosted Stars. It required that I piece a whole Jelly Roll of strips together in sets of 10 strips each. It was fun to arrange the strips in different and, hopefully, pleasing ways.
I have an amazing amount of leftovers from the above piecing exercise. The pattern refers to a second pattern to use for the leftovers. I am a little annoyed that I would need to buy a Jelly Roll and spend a bunch of time pressing the strips and piecing them together only to find that I needed less than half of the pieces. Isn’t there a better way? It may be that I did need strips that long in order to make the bias sashing/broder strips work. But it may also be that they wanted me to buy a whole Jelly Roll. I suppose I will have to make a second Christmas quilt. Or I could just waste the fabric pieces.
My great feat was that I am now ready to put the whole thing together. Since I need to make visual decisions visually, I laid out all of the pieces on two different backgrounds to see which I liked better. I also got opinions from around the house. One opinion was that the turquoise looks like ice. The stars really stand out in this piece, which I like.
At some show I bought a bunch of a turquoise batik to use as needed. I wouldn’t use it all for the background to this quilt, but I wouldn’t have to piece strips together, because I have a long enough length to just cut one piece. In looking at this layout, I think I would have to add a border strip around the outside if for no other reason than to stabilize all of those bias edges.
The other background color we considered is the snowflake blue that is part of the 12 Days of Christmas line of fabrics. In this rendition, we noticed that the blue bias strips that make up the borders and sashing drop out, because the snowflake blue is so close in color. The look of this piece is much more subtle.
Here are the Frosted Star blocks. After all the drama of this project, I have finally completed a major hurdle.
The next task is to sew the border together. The border is made up of Jelly Roll strips. We’ll see how that goes. I probably need to get a Mary Ellen Best Press refill to get through all of those strips.
The thought of all of those strips makes me think that I am done with Jelly Rolls. Time will tell though. As I love to yell at the baseball players on the radio “it’s not over until it is over!”
Since I am thinking about going out and actually buying special fabric for a project, I thought it might be a good idea to test the pattern to see if I liked it. Since I finished the top and back of the Blue Janus quilt this morning, I thought it was something that I could manage.
I dug out the directions and went to work. I can’t say I was enamored with the directions from the Moda Bakeshop. It really too me a long time to make one block and I had to follow the directions step by step, because there weren’t cutting directions for one whole block at the beginning of the section where the star starts.
I redrew the block in EQ7 just to see what it would take to make some straightforward cutting directions. I can see why Charlie Scott used some fancy triangle tricks. I created rotary cutting directions in 12″ and 9″ (both finished) sizes. These blocks use quarter square triangles and the triangles need to be cut weird sizes, which I know nobody likes. Still, my directions are a lot more straightforward than those on the Moda Bakeshop page. You can cut the quarter square triangles slightly larger and then cut them down to the normal size. I hope you will be able to click on the numbers above and download the rotary cutting directions.
I am going to make another one using my directions and let you know what happens. I am not knocking Charlie Scott. I love the free patterns out there and have a really difficult time following them. I will probably put some borders on the one above and send it to Anna Maria Horner for the Rainbow project.
I didn’t buy the Frosted Stars kit that I talked about recently. I already have a lot of projects going, I have several projects to start, there were some things I didn’t like about it, it was lots of money, etc. You know all the reasoning.
Still I couldn’t get the thing out of my mind, so I went to look at it again today. In addition to p.s. i quilt shop‘s offerings, the Fat Quarter Shop has the pattern as well. I decided to do my due diligence.
Above is an image of all the Fruitcake prints from the Fat quarter shop. I looked there. I also went to the Moda site to look at the all of the fabrics from the Basic Grey Fruitcake collection. Fruitcake is the fabric collection Charlie Scott uses for the Frosted Stars quilt. It turns out, sadly, that I don’t really like most of the fabrics included in the Fruitcake collection. I still liked the pattern, however, and thought perhaps that I would make it anyway.
I looked around to see if the pattern was available. Charlie Scott, the designer, has a website and has a link to the pattern on the Moda Bake Shop site. YAY! This revelation expanded my options. I could make the quilt with other fabrics. I was thinking aqua/turquoise and red with a little green thrown in.
In the midst of all this I emailed my mom with the various links and she said not to buy the kit, but just to get the pattern and use my own fabrics or other fabrics. Sometimes it is nice to have someone agree with me.
Somehow, I ran across the Kate Spain Christmas fabrics. They are bright and cheerful and a definite possibility. I printed out the PDF so I could look at the individual fabrics. I am not fond of the motifs on a couple of them and I couldn’t use the panels, which are part of the collection. I don’t know if they come with the Jelly Rolls and Layer cakes.
I saw this Lumiere de Noel group as I was perusing the Fat Quarter Shop site. I thought that perhaps it might be a nice choice for the Frosted Stars pattern. It has a little bit of a grey tinge in this picture, but looks much brighter in the example quilt on the site. Take a look at the individual fabrics and let me know what you think.
More thinking required, I think.
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Rachel Griffith, the power house behind p.s. i quilt has shop with the whole kit available. I have never bought a kit before aqnd am sorely tempted.
