Tuesday 21 May 2013

Jigsaw Stars - the whole story

I decided last night that if this blog is going to be an online record of my quilts and my quilting, I really ought to do a blog post for each quilt when its finished recording everything that went into making it.
 
So this is the whole story post for Jigsaw Stars, the quilt I finished last week.
 
 
A lot of my quilting is of course tied up with my business; to some extent the two are inseparable. Jigsaw Stars was made with one of the new Hoffman Bali Crackers; a 10" square charm pack. These are Hoffman's version of a layer cake which I have just started stocking. Quite often with new products you need to make something up to inspire people. This particular colour pack, Parfait, was actually my favourite in their 5th collection of pre-cuts but it wasn't very popular among my customers. And so it fell victim to being used by me.........
I spent quite a while playing around with designs, working out how much could be cut from a 10" square. I finally settled on the design and added a dull pink Hoffman batik as a background fabric which went well with all the colours in the pack.
 
The piecing went together quite quickly. I cut the squares up in a methodical manner as I worked as it was important to keep the squares in the right order. I think it was about then I decided the design was good enough to be made into a pattern that I could sell.
I always take work in progress shots of my quilts. Often they are just to post on twitter etc but they are then useful for adding to pattern instructions.
 
 
I used a new wadding for this quilt, a bolt of polyester wadding from Legacy by Pellon. I've wondered about using this for some time. Just thought it was cool to have it on the shelf!
However......
I was disappointed with it. It did say to pre-test with dark fabrics but this quilt has a variety of tones in it. It didn't beard where I was quilting but I just had a layer of fluff on the surface of the quilt which then collected in little balls of fibre like this.
 
 
 However, I have to say now that the quilt is finished and bound, it is behaving better!
 
This quilt was a first for me...........the first quilt I have free motion quilted. The stars in the centre were echo quilted using my walking foot but the pink background was stipple quilted. I'm quite pleased with my first effort!
 
 
I used King Tut 925 - Caravan in the top and a blue Masterpiece 138 in the bobbin as the quilt has blue backing.
The binding was put together with leftover bits from the Cracker pack...........and another first........I double bound the edges and used Wonder Clips for the first time!
 
Quilt summary - Jigsaw Stars
Top - Parfait Bali Cracker + Hoffman 1895 Orchid
Wadding - Legacy by Pellon Polyester
Thread - King Tut 925 + Masterpiece
Backing - Hoffman 1895 Swordfish
 
And that is the story of Jigsaw Stars
 

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