I’m having a little trouble starting my next quilt project. I have the fabrics picked out. The iron is on. But I have yet to cut into the fabric. I decided to delay the start and come over here to write about yesterday’s work.
Another finished quilt! (This one only took 7 or 8 years :)) I started it many years ago. I loved so much working on each and every block. This is a famous New York Beauty quilt designed by Karen Stone. Each block is paper pieced. I would sit on the floor and pick through my fabrics to choose just the right combination for each block.
Once the blocks were finished, you had to put them together with those wonky stars so that each block was tilted. That was boring, so that took a LONG time.
And then came the border. The original pattern included a paper pieced border in a curvy saw-toothed pattern. That was a LOT of paper piecing. It took a couple more years for me to give myself permission to do a different border. I am very happy with the way I did the border. I did some tiny liberated stars a la Gwen Marston, and added a print that seemed star-like to me, and used a lot of black and navy blue prints to piece a border.
Ah. And then it needed to be quilted. I didn’t think myself qualified to machine quilt such a pretty quilt. But with all the many seams, it didn’t seem right to hand quilt either. Finally the day came. I made a rough template of the curved side of the blocks and drew out about 5 different patterns I could free motion quilt in each one. Most of the rest of each block would be stitch in the ditch.
It took quite a bit of time to get the center quilted. And then I had to figure out how to quilt the border. I decided to outline each star, put some swirls on the star-like print, and do the rest in feathers. It wasn’t particularly hard to do. But for some reason (probably the housetop quilt project) I put it away and didn’t look at it for another year or so.
After finishing that log cabin quilt, I decided I would like to finish another quilt. I got the New York Beauty out and was surprised that all I needed to finish was one border! Good grief. I could have used it this past winter. Anyway, I finished quilting the border and put the binding on yesterday. It sure is fun to finish a quilt project.
(My grandma liked owls, so I like including one in some of my quilt projects.)