I finished my niece Elizabeth’s quilt at last! Hooray! It “only” took me 3 months, but I think that’s pretty darn speedy when you consider that those three months were also the first months of having Charlotte in the family.
This was my version of the “Star Bright” pattern from Vintage Quilt Revival by Lee Heinrich, Faith Jones and Katie Clark Blakesley. I’ve mentioned already that I’m on a “traditional turned modern” kick at the moment, and this book is full of exactly that. This is the first quilt I’ve made from it, but probably won’t be the last.
(I’m going to pause a moment for a tangent: I am clearly still working on my photo-taking skills. It took me 3 days to get a couple photos I thought were even halfway decent. My backyard fence would be a good place to take them…if it weren’t for the bright sky beyond. So this brick wall — on the other side is our master bedroom — seems to be my best option these days although it tends to do slightly funny things to the colors in the photo.)
Anyway. All of the prints are from Eloise Renouf‘s First Light collection for Cloud 9. I thought the colors would work well for a baby (but not TOO baby-ish) quilt, and the nature themes would appeal to my sister and brother-in-law. The solids on the quilt top are Kona white, primrose, and azure and the binding is Kona shadow — these were the closest matches to the colors already in the print collection, and they worked well.
The stars were all paper pieced. I’ve done a fair amount of paper piecing before, but I tried something different this time. In the past, I’ve removed the papers after my blocks are done but before I join them together. This time, I left the papers in until all the blocks were connected. It was a bigger pain to remove them afterward, but I do think it helped keep things stable, and therefore helped my accuracy in getting the staggered stars aligned properly.
I kept the quilting very simple as always — straight lines spaced ~2.5 inches apart. The only exception was around the three long vertical seams, where I stitched a 1/2 inch away from the seamline on either side to give it a little more stability.
The backing is another print from the First Light collection. I like how it’s a lot darker than the others, so there’s a big contrast between the front and the back. I quilted with white thread on the front and navy thread on the back since I didn’t want the quilting to stand out too much on either side. And I machine stitched the binding as I always do. Hooray for another finish!
Here’s cutie Elizabeth testing it out. I hope she loves it for years to come!
Yvonne @Quilting Jetgirl says
I really like how this design is not centered. The quilt looks great and it is so impressive you were able to make it with everything else you had going on at the same time. Your niece sure seems to love it. It always makes me so happy to see quilts being used and loved. 🙂
Side tangent alert! Cloud9 makes some fantastic fabrics. I keep meaning to spend some time with their Cirrus solids and I hope they continue to expand the colors they offer, because they have a bit more depth than the Kona solids and would probably pair really well with their prints.