Starlight Symphony

Awhile ago I finished piecing Starlight Symphony, a beautiful batik paper pieced quilt from season 2 of Angela Walters's wonderful Midnight Quilt Show. And finally, I'm quilting it!

Since I've already seen how Angela quilted hers, and since I love her quilting choices, of course I borrowed heavily from her designs. There's no shame in copying a master!

I love the secondary design that happens between stars! Straight lines combined with free-motion are one of my favorites ways to add contrast.

In the negative space in the center, I had a few ideas in mind. I wanted the middle stars to look like they're sitting atop a bed of ... space bubbles or something. So I quilted a band of pebbles in the center, and gradually changed it into swirls as they reached the outer stars. I also echoed some of the star shapes in that space to add some extra interest.

Taking the quilt off the rollers is one of the most exciting parts of quilting. Since I can't see it all at once when I'm quilting it, the first moment I get the full "reveal", it's quite a feeling! I really love this quilt, as the batiks are gorgeous and the texture is lovely!

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Linking up with: Busy Hands Quilts, My Quilt Infatuation, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Crazy Mom Quilts, and Cooking Up Quilts.

Starlight Symphony ~ Ready to Quilt

I used to say that I haven't met a batik I didn't like. And for a long time, that was true. But then I got into machine-quilting, and realized that my love of batiks started to wane a bit. I'm not really sure why, but it might have to do with batiks being more difficult to quilt over. However, after I watched the Scrappy Stars Quilt of the Midnight Quilt Show, I just loved the beauty of the batiks Angela used, and just like that, my batik fever is back.

Fabric audition is one of my favorite parts of quilting, second only to machine quilting, but boy, do I find it a challenge. For this particular quilt, I decided to dig into my batik stash. Luckily, I have a huge one due to my batik fever last year. I came up with the the same groups of colors Angela used: dark blues / purples, light blues / greens, and yellows / reds.

This is a paper piecing project, which means loads of printing / pre-perforating. I know a lot of people don't pre-perforate, but I picked up that habit early on and just prefer it, even if it's slower, because it makes folding and tearing off the paper so easy. Plus, there's something really satisfying about pre-perforating!

After that, it's time to piece this. Even though paper piecing is slow, I actually quite enjoy it. The beautiful batiks keep me happy throughout the process, and the usual problem I run into with paper piecing, ultra-bulky seams to quilt over, isn't much of an issue with this pattern, as Angela specifically designed it for easy quilting later. This is my 3rd paper piecing project, and it's actually by far the easiest. The most common mistake I make during paper piecing is getting the sides mixed up and having to rip, but with batiks, there is no wrong side, so that's great!

Until now, I didn't know I could keep the paper in during assembly. In the past, I always tore it off after I'm done with a block, and the bias edges usually mean it can be a pain to assemble. But keeping the paper in means assembly is just a tad easier.

I really like this top, and now it's ready to quilt!

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This post participated in the link party at Cooking Up Quilts. Link up and join the fun!

Lakeside Quilt

I've never done tube strip piecing before, but after watching Amy Gibson's Cozy Throw Quilt Class on Craftsy, I decided to give it a try. I think it's pretty fun, and it's kind of magical how quickly the blocks come out one by one. I love that feeling when I open up a triangle to expose a diagonal block.

I used a mini pack of blue batik fabrics and some white jelly roll strips to make this quilt. I would have preferred to make this without sashing as I really enjoyed the way the non-sashed blocks aligned together, but I didn't have enough fabric for that option. However, after I started piecing it, I was really glad for the sashing to be there. The precuts were all slightly different widths, which made sewing a proper seam allowance challenging. If there was no sashing and the blocks were all touching, the strips might look misaligned. But sashing disguises any of those problems. I had some trouble with the bias edges, which stretched even with minimal handling. Assembly was a bit painful, but somehow I managed a flat quilt. I'm not sure how that happened.

When deciding how to quilt this, I initially decided to do an edge-to-edge echo shell design. Easy, quick ... and apparently, I didn't *really* want to do that. The idea of ignoring the geometry and the piecing on the quilt was heartbreaking. At the last minute, I changed my entire quilting design so that it's completely custom quilting, filled with feathers, echoes, piano keys, the works. It took several times as long as an echo shell design would have taken, but I don't mind ... I piece to quilt, after all! I'm really proud of my feathers in this quilt, as they're definitely the best feathers I've ever done. However, the piano keys were free hand and they weren't so hot. But as bad as they are, I didn't rip them out, and figured that every finished quilt is just a stepping stone to becoming a better quilter.

Despite the less than stellar piano keys, overall I'm very pleased with how this quilt turned out. I want to try tube piecing again sometime, for sure.

This post participated in the link-up at Crazy Mom Quilts.

Fiesta Runner

Before I really started quilting, I bought a book Learn Quilt-As-You-Go by Gudrun Erla that had a gorgeous batik strip runner in the front. I knew I wanted to make that runner some day.

Fast forward more than a year, and I'm finally making that runner. In this type of Quilt-As-You-Go method, the backing and batting are prepared and basted first, the batting carefully marked, and then strips are sewn on it, following the marking. There's no surface quilting required afterwards ... but that doesn't mean I won't fill it with quilting anyway!

I used a single-sided fusible batting from Bosal, which does save me having to pin baste. For the fabric I picked a gorgeous mini pack of jelly roll batik strips that I had been saving just for this runner. The colors are so bright that it's almost too bright, so I added in the yellow batik from my stash, and I think it really makes a big difference.

Although I didn't need to add quilting, of course I was going to quilt it. I did this in a serendipitous way, as I didn't plan it and just sat down and started quilting whatever came to mind. The colors are so powerful on this quilt that I knew I could get away with lots of different designs and not worry about them overwhelming the quilt top. I ended up with 7-8 different designs.

The quilting makes the runner flatter and adds a wonderful texture. I can't stop running my hands over it. This runner seems like the perfect outdoor table topper, complete with drinks with little umbrellas in them. (Never mind that right now, outside is the beginning of a Chicago winter.)