Friday 18 May 2012

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.

22 comments:

  1. I am a sucker for stars, and red, but for some reason I like your blue version better! Nice work!

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  2. That is so great!!!! I love the simplicity of the blue!

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  3. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned...

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  4. This is a stunning quilt and the minute you mentioned paperpiecing, well, I love it and I'm on my way to yoru patterns page as soon as I'm done witht his note. I can see this as a great Quilts of Valor quilt for our veterans. Your design and work are beautiful.

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  5. two color quilts are always so stunning! Beautiful
    Ann

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  6. Turned out beautiful Krista.....great quilting too

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  7. I love traditional patterns!

    Margaret
    http://quiltsoflove.blogspot.com/

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  8. Lovely quilt ! And how cool you made a pattern out of it ,-))

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  9. beautiful. i have a love/hate thing with paper piecing--in some ways i love it totally and in others i hate doing it. oh, well...yours is a wonderful one and the quilting is great. thanks for sharing and have a great day

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  10. Simple and stunning! I like the blue version best. I haven't tried a LeMoyne Star because I'm afraid of them. I can't imagine it is 2.5 inches.

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  11. aussi réussi en bleu que en rouge ,felicitation

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  12. Simple and stunning. Such precise piecing!

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  13. I'm a big fan of star quilts, so yours immediately caught my eye! It's stunning and I'm so impressed that you've published a pattern for it - that's determination! Thank you for sharing.

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  14. I love both colourways in this quilt. Well done!

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  15. The math boggles my brain - this is a wonderful quilt!

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  16. Lovely design; beautiful quilts!

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  17. This is so fun! I love stars and the repeating-sort-of-fractal like nature of the star-within-a-star is great. Love the navy and white too, makes the design really pop.

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  18. Krista, Your blue star quilt is very pretty. You are like me in that you do some things the hard way first! Very nice outcome though. Thanks for sharing.

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