Making Starburst

This quilt challenged me to find my inner scrappy. There was angst and re-makes:

And angst and out-takes (not all of this squad made the final team):

Strategies to ensure that randomness happened:

Quite a lot of pressing in very warm summer conditions:

And lots of holding my breath as it started to come together. Will I like it? Will I like it?

The final verdict? Yes, I like it :-)

I had it quilted by longarmer Carol Fearon. She ditched the blocks and outlined the stars and did a nice little square zig-zag round the border. It is lovely and soft - just need some cooler weather now in order to enjoy the fruits of my labour :-)

Gypsy Wife underway!

I had already been planning to make Jen Kingwell's Gypsy Wife my personal BOM project this year when I discovered that someone else had cleverly read my mind, sorted out a schedule to follow, set up a Flickr group, and printed t-shirts... (that last part might have been stretching the truth, but I'd wear one if such a thing were to happen!!)

So I looked at the schedule for February and the lovely pile of fabric that I bought from Amitie. They are fabulous at sending 'scrap' packs to a dollar amount that you specify. This works for me - my stash is a curious assortment of fabric that I think will be useful for binding (stripes and the like), some blenders, some small collections of fabric that I have been obsessed with at some point or another, and now a largish collection of low volume fabric which has been my latest obsession. None of that really works for a quilt like Gypsy Wife so I was very happy when this turned up in the mail:

First up on the list was a block called Colour Wheel. Oh the agony choosing what fabric to cut into first. According to Jen "the greater the number of fabrics you use, the more fun your quilt will become". Righto.

This was an easy enough block to piece, I just forgot to pay attention to the instructions and only managed 50% accuracy with this little group (all the pale triangles need to be on the same side of the larger piece).

And then it was puzzle time. Again, much quicker if you actually look the helpful diagrams.

And finally success.

One down. Eleventy million to go.

Linking up today over at Freshly Pieced :-)

Stardust progress

I am having an enforced break from my AMH quilt. I have run out of fabric for the border pieces and I am reluctant to start sewing them together before I have finished all the cutting. This is because of too many incidences of bad quilty maths combined with a 'she'll be right' attitude.

So I rustled around in my basket of WIPs and shook the cobwebs out of my Stardust project. I got all enthused when I realised that I could start framing the star blocks. Even more exciting when I realised that my stars still have their points :-)

After all the blocks are put together there is a scrappy border to go on made up of little pieces of the star fabric. I'm hoping the overall look is 'quiet scrappy' (if there is such a thing!).