Sunday, October 24, 2010

My Christmas Star Top is Done

It is nice when you can marathon a weekend to finish a quilt.   Both the blocks and the star were done done on Friday.  I was feeling pretty foxy about putting the top together.  Just put on the border fabric for the star. sew the rows of blocks together, add them to the star and finish with the outer border.  Zip Zap Zam I should be done by noon on Saturday.

Remember the adage, Measure Twice CUT Once? I ended up having to buy another 1.5 yards of the border print because I cut the length 2 inches too short to be able to frame the star with a mitered border.  Of course I realized this at 7 PM on Friday so that brought everything to a halt until I could get into the store for more fabric - I know, what an excuse.



So Saturday I picked up the fabric and got it washed, cut and on the star with nearly perfect miters.  I already had the blocks laid out on the design wall so I could just sew the rows together.  This afternoon/evening I was able to complete the block assembly and finally the outer border.  With a little convincing, the border fabric mitered nicely to frame the quilt and turn the corners. 

I picked up some nice Christmas stencils at the AQS show in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago that will work perfectly for this quilt.  I hope to have this done for the holidays.  Now that would be a record for me.

Friday, October 22, 2010

A Christmas Star

In all of the years that I have been quilting I have made a single Christmas lap quilt.  It has been on my wish list to make a Christmas quilt for my bed for a number of years but it never made it to the top because I haven't seen a group of Christmas fabric that I wanted to spend that much time or money on.  This year I took it off the list all together because I didn't think I would have the time.  So, of course, this is the year that they came out with a line of Christmas fabrics that I like and enough variety that it blends with my stash.
I tinkered with a couple of designs on Electric Quilt and looked through the patterns, books and magazines until I realized the Glad's Lone Star in Ohio would be a good base for the quilt.  The Robert Kaufman line of fabric includes a nice striped fabric that I am going to use as an inside border around the center star and then again as mt final outside border.


I have had to put it all up on the design wall so I can see when too many of the same fabrics end up in the same corner.  Now that I am sewing the blocks together it is starting to look like Christmas.

Lone Star Maniac - The Binding is Done

The quilting is complete.  The binding cut and complete - it took more than 1 or 2 baseball games to get 480 inches of binding stitched down.  I just have the label to complete and attached.  I will see about getting a photo of the completed quilt to put on the blog.

Be sure to plan some time in the first week of January to see the staff quilt show at Glad Creations in Minneapolis.  I think just about every one of us has a Lone Star that is going in.  I have seen Susan's American Jane star on the Glad's blog, and Nathan's is a beautiful Judy Niemeyer Lone Star.  It should be quite a show for all the stars.