Can you believe I missed another deadline on this project?? It doesn’t help that I started full time work 2 months ago. What an adjustment period!
I have finally arrived to the quilting – but let me show you what it took:
As you know, my plan was to place the triangles of the star onto the white background- appliquéing and quilting in one. Sounds great in theory- but several issues popped up.
First- I don’t have enough backing fabric. I knew it would be close when I ordered it- I took all they had. But I overlooked that it was DIRECTIONAL. Ooops! My quilt will be 102” by 102”- so I’m looking at 3 pieces wide since my fabric is 42” wide (standard quilting fabric). Yeah- the back is not going to be pretty.
Second- once I laid it all out, I realized my center compass was not large enough to cover the edges of the large compass triangles- oh no!! This issue stumped me for days. Finally I settled on enlarging the center compass- not the easiest of tasks! It took several attempts but it’s fairly flat now.
Third problem- the shadowing of the dark blocks. It bugs me- but I couldn’t figure out a way to fix it without backing all the larger triangle of the large compass. I don’t have enough fabric to do that, nor do I want to spend all that time.
Fourth problem- tenting in the center. It was virtually impossible to avoid this problem. Appliquéing very large pieces is not easy to do! I’m going to quilt the center compass heavily to deal with this problem, but that will lead to difficulties in the drape when I’m finished….
My initial design was to put curved cross hatching in the large compass. I knew curved lines would blur any imperfections in the “straightness” of my compass. But these pieces are BIG! And trying to manage large arcs on my domestic sewing machine is not the easiest. So I decided I would just do the first half of the cross hatching- just the hatching- not the cross. It would make it less likely for pleats to show up on the back too, since I would not be crossing my work.
Finally time for some fun! I basted on the small compass, dealing with the tenting as best as I could.
I came up with this quilting design to keep everything in place. In the photo- you see my blue marker lines, but I’m actually quilting with white thread so it won’t be that visible. I plan to put the recipient names and dates around the extension circle that I added- hopefully I’ll post it soon! Happy quilting, everyone!
Quilts in Common 