Saturday at the Houston Modern Quilt Guild meeting members showed off their works in progress they hoped to complete this year. I showed the smallish quilt pictured above. There are 9 blocks, each with an eight-point string pieced star, sashed with scrappy pieced 1/2 inch sashing. All of the prints are 1930s reproduction fabrics, and the background is a tone on tone white. I started this quilt, which measures roughly 40" x 40", about 10 years ago. The procrastination came about because I started handquilting it, which is pretty difficult on the stars themselves because of all the seams.
When I showed this to the group on Saturday, I had only quilted around the inside of each of three stars. Motivated by the challenge to "get 'er done" I went home and quilted around the inside of another star, and around the outsides of those four stars. Yesterday I had a few friends over for sewing, and I quilted inside and outside of two more stars. Now I'm 2/3rd of the way done with the quilting involving the stars! I'm not entirely certain how I'll quilt the rest. . . I'm thinking I'll quilt around the sashings, but I need to pick out a pattern to quilt in the border. I'll have a 2" finished width for quilting, and I'm considering making a template the same diamond shape as used to make the stars, and laying them out end to end around the border. I haven't measured for length, but I could just center my diamond chain so that I have the same unquilted distance on each end of each border strip as needed.
Sadly, I noticed when I was putting the quilt back in my bag on Saturday that there are lots and lots of stains on the quilt. I guess dragging it around for ten years got a bit messy. Looks like it has had several run ins with diet coke or something similarly colored, so as soon as I get the quilting finished and a binding on I'll have to see if Oxi-clean can work some magic! I'd hate to have invested all of this time (and ended up with raw, bloodied fingertips from the hand quilting!) just to end up with a stained up project I can't display!
1 comment:
I'm glad to hear you made some more progress! I hope you can get the stains out, because it's such a beautiful quilt!
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