Mystic Star for the Bloggers Quilt Festival

WELCOME TO POPPYPRINT!

For all the online chitchat about batiks not cutting the mustard for modern quilts, I present Mystic Star. There are some projects for which batiks provide the necessary depth and colour saturation required for a design to really shine. I believe Annette Ornelas' Mexican Star pattern is one of them. This quilt was completed four years ago just in time for my guild's bi-annual quilt show. It is my one and only award-winning quilt!

Several members of the guild took this course from local teacher Brenda Brayfield. It was my first introduction to folding back bias edges to simulate curved piecing. I have seen this pattern made up in several different colourways, and varying techniques for holding the curves back. Lots of quilters choose to sew a line 1/8" inside the curve on their machine, but I really didn't trust my skills to create a smooth line. Instead, I knew I wanted to stitch the curves down by hand. By complete fluke, I came across the perfect vial of glass seed beads to embellish each curve. The beading was done prior to sandwiching the quilt.

The trick with pre-sandwich embellishing is then trying to quilt around it! I figured out my quilting plan for each design area of the quilt using a large sheet of clear vinyl laid on top of the quilt. Using a wipe-away fine tip marker, I doodled various quilting ideas onto the vinyl until finding one I liked enough to commit to thread.

Not happy with the yellow quilting lines that crossed in the intersections, I simply covered them up with a little pile of beads! In addition to free motion quilting in the large background areas, I added random seed stitches and blanket stitched the binding on for a little extra somethin'-somethin' since the binding was done in the same fabric as the background.

For a show quilt, I think it's nice to create a special label.

This is the only quilt that permanently hangs on display in our home (outside of my sewing room, that is) and I never tire of looking at it. It's a beautiful pattern and I don't think it would be nearly as effective in any fabric other than batiks, really.

If you are stopping in via Amy's Bloggers Quilt Festival, thanks for taking a peek! Have fun touring all of the beautiful quilts, head back to Amy's for a complete list of participants.