Winter Stars

The big black-and-white king sized quilt is officially done!  

A recap for those not following along:  my aunt requested a king sized black-and-white quilt.  We picked a pattern called Midnight Garden.  I started prepping it about a year ago, creating my own plexiglass templates, trying out way too many layouts, and finally started piecing the whole thing together.  Over the last year I had several delays, including a change in heart on background fabric (with weeks of dithering), a frozen shoulder and recovering from tick bite.  I had reasonably anticipated finishing this in time to submit it to one of the local county fairs, but alas, they all passed me by.  But I finished before the holidays and I am pleased with the result.

Last week the weather finally turned sunny without much wind, so we headed over to UMass Amherst for photographs (which has a huge accessible wall with good sunlight).  Lots of photos - you can see a larger version if you click on a photo.  

 

Winter Stars is a short name for a big quilt.  Rob and I pitched dozens of names but couldn't find anything that picked up on the kaleidoscope blocks, or the stars, or the oh-so-many-other-interesting-bits we saw when we looked at the quilt.  Understated seemed the way to go.

I made the quilt a little larger than requested, figuring that a too-big quilt was better than one that was too small.  The finished quilt is 103 x 90.5 inches.  Quilting caused it to shrink a bit from the original 106 x 93.  And although I prewashed the fabric and batting, I'm sure it could shrink a bit more when it gets washed.  

I am often asked how long it takes to make a quilt - so I attempted to track how long this one took.  Most days I set a stopwatch whenever I started work on it (and others I forgot to start or stop it).  According to my notes, Winter Stars took roughly 180 hours to complete with the following breakdown:

Piecing Blocks	80 (+19)
Assemble Blocks	16
Sandwich	4
Quilt	52
Bind	13

Piecing the original set blocks was 80 hours.  However, I spent an additional 19 hours ripping out and replacing fabric when I changed my mind on the background colors.  Ugh!

(For those of you unfamiliar with the terms:  Piecing is cutting and sewing together fabric to create the repeating pattern blocks.  Assembling is stitching each of the blocks to each other.  Sandwiching is laying out the backing fabric, followed by the batting, then the top and then pinning/basting the layers together.  Quilting is stitching over the sandwich to hold the quilt together.  Binding is finishing the outside edge with fabric.) 

I was amazed at the amount of time it takes to bury threads and hand-stitch the binding.  I usually do these in the evening in front of the TV - so I've never really considered how long I spend on that.  For this quilt I spent nearly as much time burying threads as I did actually quilting it under the machine.

 

Quilting was done with three passes.  The first two in white were in and around the stars, which creates the cross pattern seen across the back of the quilt.  The third pass was in dark grey in the squares to tack them down but not to detract from the kaleidoscope patterns.   

If you wish to read more about project, either search for Midnight Garden or the King tag (since this is likely to be the only king-sized quilt I make).  
  

The wall at UMass was near a large set of concrete stairs, so I played with some grey-on-grey shots.

As we walked back to the car, the fence and the brilliant red trees caught my eye.  Okay - one more artsy shot.  

It's ready to ship!  My aunt and uncle are looking forward to its arrival. 

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