Stars

Time to introduce another of my projects - my stars quilt. I started this one after a trip to the Sandown quilt show where I came across Makower's (then new) Zen fabric range and fell in love. I bought a small jelly roll and a 8x10" pack of the fabrics with the idea that I might make a jelly cake style quilt (strips + blocls => very fast quilt).

Only problem was I already had 3 'sewing machine' projects waiting to be finished so I really didn't need another one and the fabrics were so subtle (completely unlike what I would normally use) that it seemed a shame to inflict a sewing machine on them! Thus it was decided - I would do a hand sewn quilt so that I could make it in front of the telly.

There's a bit of back story to this that goes back to when I first started doing patchwork (age 12ish I think) and my mum was all encouraging and from the depths of nowhere dug out her paper pieces stash from the days when she used to make tea cosys and the such from hexagons. I however had a book that suggested there was a way to make quilts that didn't involve lots of little pieces of paper and endless hours of toil and jumped straight into the modern cut the blocks, sew the blocks, have a quilt, method. I think she was a little disappointed I was doing things so completely differently from how she remember but she went along with it and even started taking me to courses and doing some herself and these days she's a more prolific quilter than I am. As a result of all this she was utterly bemused when I informed her that my insta-quilt had now become a paper-pieced diamond project!

After a bit of thinking (and that in build dread of the hexagon pieces) I decided to go with diamonds and to arrange them into stars in a sort of grandmothers flower garden pattern. The backing for this will be something neutral so I put the lighter fabrics in the middle and the darker ones around the outside. Finally I decided to keep everything split by colour waves - this may turn out to be a mistake but we shall see.

Anyway, here's the quilt so far (okay, so it's a stack of pieces of the quilt but you get the idea!) I've done the Brulee, Kir & Mocha colour waves and right at the bottom you can see the first of the Earl Grey creaping in. Also to come are Rosemary (green) and possibly Liqurice (black) although I'm playing with the idea of using this as seperators for the other blocks.