Blogger's Quilt Festival

The Bloggers Quilt Festival starts today! Amy run this twice a year, and it gives quilting bloggers a chance to share a story about one of their favourite quilts. My entry this year is my Starburst quilt.

I had this lap quilt in my head for several months before I got up the nerve to try to make it. I thought the idea of an expanding star, with a smaller and smaller star in the center of each would be really interesting. So last June, when the colour at Patchwork Times monochromatic challenge was Indigo, I decided to jump in.

The biggest challenge with this quilt was the math. I don't (well, in those days I didn't) do paper piecing. So I was determined to make the quilt without paper or templates. First, I made the center. A lemoyne star, to start the pattern. Based on the size I wanted to end, this block was 2.5" finished. Maybe that should have been a sign (have you ever tried to make a miniature lemoyne star?) but I soldiered on, I measured and calculated and calculated again. Then I cut. And the pieces were the wrong size. So I tried again. And again.

Eventually I figured out that it was best to cut everything over-sized, and trim the star points down to the right size. Once I started doing that, everything went really smoothly. The nice part of this was that after the very center star, there is not one single Y-seam in this pattern.  I hadn't realized it would work out that way, until I started piecing it,


I included a pieced border, because after all the work in the center I felt the border needed something extra too.  Then it took me 6 months to start quilting it.  Again, after putting so much effort into this quilt, it needed special attention in the quilting,.  Here are a couple of close-ups of the quilting.  It is machine quilted on my domestic machine.  I finished the quilt in March this year.

And now. over the past 2 weeks I have made this quilt twice more.  This time I paper pieced the center, and that was much easier.  The quilt pattern is now available for sale in the patterns section of my blog.

There are lots more quilts in the festival.  I hope you'll drop by Amy's Creative Side and look around.