Wonky Star Engagement Quilt Top

I finally finished my 4th large quilt top.  I wrote about the inspiration for this in June when I made my cat bed.  The stars use quite a bit of fabric, and involves tons of cutting & trimming, so I'm glad to be done with this part.  I added a border to it right after I took it down,  it was a bit smaller than I wanted it to be. The tutorial I used for for the wonky stars is on The Silly BooDilly blog.

I got this done the night before my husband went on a work trip, and while tempted to ask him to go hold it up for me at 6 am before his flight, resisted.  None of our trees are really set up for anything to hang evenly, so I jury rigged some zip ties and dangling twine off a magnolia tree, and managed to get it hanging "somewhat" evenly.

This is going to be an engagement gift for my lovely ex-husband and his fiance - he said he liked blues and greens, and she liked oranges and reds, so I attempted to work a lot of those hues into it.  Sadly I ordered the fabric before I got a Kona color card so I ended up not quite as thrilled by some of the colors in person.

After making a lot of the solid stars, they were reading as flat and dull to me, so I decided to mix some prints into it - are all my choices successful? Probably not, but he's given me some duds of gifts over the years, so I'm not too concerned ;) With the prints, and adding a few stars in Art Gallery's Pure Element's empire yellow, I feel it has a lot more life in it now.



It is now sandwiched, and I've decided to do a binding-less quilt.  That wasn't exactly my plan.  I ordered 118" Kona Premium Muslin for the back, measured carefully enough to cut strips off to border the front, then found myself 2 inches short since I neglected to take what would be the new larger size of the front into account.  I'd say I wont make that mistake again but...I'm sure I will. On the bright side the Kona muslin is actually pretty soft and snuggly, I will probably use it in the future too.


My plan is to do hand quilting around a lot of the stars, though I am thinking to do a series of machine quilted squares around it just to make sure it is well stabilized first. Luckily I think it will be a long enough engagement that by the time I finish, it hasn't become a wedding gift!