Wisteria Stars - Part One

Now that Christmas has come and gone, I can post pictures of the making of Wisteria Stars. It was the bridal couple's wedding and Christmas gift, so I didn't want to talk about it till it was done.

April 1, 2009
Danielle and I both like purple so I chose the color scheme from flowers; green, yellow and shades of purple. I had a block I wanted to use so I went to Electric Quilt with these ideas and drafted a few layouts; that helped tremendously with the math. They wanted a king-sized quilt for their new bed. That meant piecing at least 42 - 12" blocks.

I told Nathan and Danielle the colors were going to be green, purple and yellow. But based on the draft I thought it was going to be forest green.

I pulled fabrics from my stash. I bought four yards of yellow, just to be safe, not knowing if I was going to set the blocks with lattice or not. Some things you just have to decide as you go along. The greens ended up being in the sage family and I wondered how I was going to explain to Danielle why I'd changed the color. The next time they were visiting, they talked excitedly about the remodeling and repainting they were doing on the house they'd bought. Danielle said, "I found this terrific green that I want to use on the main wall in the living room, it's not really green though... that is, it's more sage than green." (!) I knew my colors would be okay.

April 19

Nine blocks

I thought the color balance was good, but they seemed a little *blah* I generally cut and sew as I go, choosing fabrics to maintain the balance. I searched the stash for fabrics that weren't all tone on tone, the blocks needed more visual texture.

May 20

Piecing subunits



Piecing blocks

I sewed most evenings and on weekends. The block assembly went fast and I was having a blast, each new fabric leading me to want to sew the next and the next to see how they would look. I played with layouts on the floor because EQ can only give you an idea of how things will look.

Did I want to set the blocks on point? Too much open space...

June 4

Sixteen blocks - more texture

June 28

The blocks were made from four - six inch units pieced using Log Cabin construction. It was so easy to sew up batches of the cream and yellow units that each block used.

Ready of the last eighteen blocks

July 20

36 blocks

I alternated the green and purple in the layout, threw in some rose colored blocks to vary things a bit. It got so big I couldn't fit it on the design wall anymore.

My friend Rosy took this picture of me taking a picture of the quilt.

July 24
While piecing more blocks I realized I hadn't photographed how they were assembled.

This method was a dream. The blocks fell together without a lot of fuss and accuracy was really good. By the end of July I had all the blocks pieced. I laid them out to audition settings.

Traditional set stones at intersections as in the EQ draft?



Or off set set stones, creating a secondary design?

The next set of pictures are dated late September. I had to recover from my accident injury. I tried to sew in the days following the concussion, but the seeming complexity of the task was just too much for me at the time.

September 27

Piecing the lattice

Setting the rows



Block close-up

To be continued...