First Light Designs

Yes, indeed! My Reach for the Stars quilt top is completely pieced, all 88″ x 108″ inches of it. I finished it at Quilt Camp last week. It’s a bit wrinkled from being all folded up during transport, but here it is:

I like the look of the black squares floating in the outer border, so rather than binding the quilt in solid black to frame it, as originally planned, I’m going to use more of the background fabric.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The quilt has to be quilted first! I am going to (gulp) invest in custom longarm quilting on this one. The quilter I have chosen is equally at home with free motion and digitized quilting, and I expect my quilt will have some of both. I’ll have a better idea after we meet next week.

While I was at Quilt Camp I also pieced the back. It measures about 96″ x 116″ and incorporates the two Jacobean floral focus fabrics I used for the fussy-cut images in the center medallion and individual blocks. This is a partial view of the back:

One of the prints was a border print, so I pieced it in both directions for a bit more visual interest.

I’m still grappling with the realization that this quilt may not fit my queen-size bed. The 88″ width is fine, even if the quilting draws it up a few inches. It’s the length that’s the problem. According to several websites I’ve looked at, the recommended length for a standard queen or king-size quilt is 94″. Even if the quilting shrinks 4″ from the length, it’s still going to be 10″ longer than the recommended length. If this had dawned on me sooner (like when I started making this quilt in January), I might well have resized the blocks. Too late now. But I’m not going to fret about it. Surely I’ll find a good spot to display this quilt.

On a brighter note, I’ve selected a name for my quilt:  Catch a Falling Star. If you were around in 1957 (as I was), you’ll recognize it as the name of a song by Italian-American crooner Perry Como.

The final two corners are on my Reach for the Stars quilt top, and already it is huge. It measures 80″ x 100″ — oh my! It will measure 88″ x 108″ once the final borders are on. The custom quilting will shrink it a few inches, of course, but still — I think it’s going to be too big for my queen size bed. I was lamenting this to my twin sister, Diane, who quickly pointed out that she has two king size beds in her home and oh, by the way, wouldn’t this quilt look terrific in the upstairs guest room?

There’s no room in my house big enough to photograph the entire quilt top so I placed an old sheet on the patio out back, centered the quilt on top of it, and took a picture in the waning light:

Those of you who have been following my efforts to achieve a symmetrical checked border now have a good look at how it all fits together. Your next view of this will be a finished quilt top!

Border Breakthrough? More of a Corner Crisis. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic. It wasn’t really a crisis, but what I had envisioned as an easy way to extend the points of a narrow inner border into the wide outer border on the corners of my Reach for the Stars quilt turned out to be anything but.

(As regular readers know, my quilt is based on designer Terri Krysan’s quilt of the same name that was recently serialized in Quilter’s Newsletter magazine. I’ve been working on this quilt for the better part of a year, posting progress reports as often as I had something to show. The previous post recounts my efforts to achieve a symmetrical border and to carry the symmetry into the corners. If you haven’t read that post yet, you might want to, as it helps put today’s post in context.)

I could have taken the easy way out and simply attached the corner units without fussing with inner border points at all. The quilt has strong diagonal lines, and it probably would have looked just fine:

Butting the components up against each other gives you a better idea of what a corner would look like sewn together:

But I wanted the point of the solid black border to extend into the print border. Although I have departed in several ways from Terri Krysan’s design, this was one element I wanted to preserve. All I needed to do — I thought — was replace a 2″ black print square with a  block that included a solid black piece, like this one:

Easy enough to make. I toyed with the idea of paper piecing the unit but it was just as fast to sew two half-square triangles to a larger triangle. I made a 2½” block and then trimmed it to the finished size of 2″ square to test its position as a replacement block. Much to my dismay, it was too small. The bottom edges of the triangle didn’t match the seamlines in the solid black border.

The cause of the discrepancy, I finally figured out, was the finished width of the narrow black border: 1⅜”. I had cut the border strips 2½” inches wide, not knowing how wide they would turn out to be, knowing only that the finished width would be determined by where the setting triangles came together at the corners. This is because of the highly unscientific but vaguely mathematical way I figured and constructed the borders. If the narrow black border had finished at 1¼” wide, I think it might have fit.

But it didn’t. What to do?

The solution came to me only when I started thinking outside the box. Literally. Instead of working with a 2½” square (the box), I played with a 2½” x 6½” rectangle of black print — the equivalent of three squares — and larger triangles of the solid black. That gave way to two 2½” x 3½” rectangles when I realized they would give me the shape I desired in the size needed to match the other seams. Let me show you what I mean:

The larger pieces are the 2½” x 3½” rectangles. The solid black pieces are 1⅝” squares, about to become foldover corners:

When I joined the two pieces in the middle and tested the edges of the resized triangle against the seamlines in the black border, they were right where they needed to be. Hurrah!

Here is the new rectangular unit inserted into part of a corner unit . . .

. . . and here is that corner unit joined to the quilt:

This close-up shows how the seam joining the two solid black triangles becomes, in effect, an extension of the mitered seam in the narrow black border:.

This view of the second corner shows you how it all fits together:

Two more corners to go. Then all that’s left is to add the final border of background fabric, which helps float the nine-patch units. Can you believe it? I am almost done!

When I posted almost a month ago on my Reach for the Stars sampler quilt, pictured here . . .

. . . I had finished the center medallion and 14 surrounding blocks and was getting ready to tackle the intricate pieced border. I say “tackle” because I knew it would be a challenge figuring out how to get the corners perfectly symmetrical. I knew I wanted to emulate the lacelike effect designer Terri Krysan achieved by putting nine-patch blocks on point in her border, but I also knew I wanted all of my corners to match.

First I added a narrow black border on all four sides, mitering the corners. Next I made several nine-patch units and cut several setting triangles and then just started playing with their positions around the perimeter of the quilt top, which had been moved to the floor after outgrowing my design wall. I walked around the quilt countless times, trying out nine-patch units and setting triangles in different spots along the outer sides.

Border Breakthrough #1 occurred when it became apparent to me that the corner design needed to include two nine-patch units with a strip between them, like this:

I mocked up the rest of the corner and even sewed some pieces together. I expected I would need to miter the corner with a seam in the middle of the center strip to match the mitered seam in the narrow black border.

When I looked at the photo I had taken above, it hit me that I didn’t need to miter the seam at all! If you follow the horizontal line at the tip of the narrow black border, you’ll see what I saw. Here is Version 2 of the corner unit . . .

. . . showing a much easier way to finish the corner. And here is Version 3, which assures the continuity of the black print fabric all around the quilt next to the narrow black border:

The position of the black print setting triangles at each corner coincided with a black print setting triangle hitting the exact center of the top and bottom of the quilt. You’ll see what I mean when you look at the next photo:

See the point of the black sashing on the middle block, right where it touches the narrow black border? Follow the line into the border and note how it intersects both the black print setting triangle next to the black border and the blue setting triangle on the outer edge.

Unfortunately, there was no way that same design element was going to hit the middle of the long sides. That’s when Border Breakthrough #2 came into play. After much fiddling around, I determined that if I completely removed one nine-patch unit from a long side and added one more strip to two of the remaining nine-patch units, the middle of a black print setting triangle would hit the middle of the long side. Just what I wanted it to do!

Here’s what the “nine-patch plus” unit looked like just before adding the setting triangles . . .

. . . and here’s what it looked like next to a regular nine-patch:

I sewed all of my blocks together and then discovered that the border strip was about an inch too long (much better than an inch too short!). My solution? To re-sew the nine-patch units taking a full quarter-inch seam rather than my regular scant quarter-inch seam. Doing that with six nine-patch units and two “nine-patch plus” units took up the excess fullness, and my border fit perfectly. Was someone doing the Happy Dance? Oh, yeah!

Here’s a look at the middle of one long side, with the setting triangle hitting in just the right spot. Look above the small blue and black hourglass block in the valley between the two blocks near the top center of the photo:

Here you are looking across the quilt to one corner:

The “nine-patch plus” units — the ones with two black print squares on point — are evenly interspersed along the long sides, and even though the two short sides have no “nine-patch plus” units, everything still looks balanced because the borders match. My approach was strictly trial and error — no graph paper, no computer software program, no calculator work — with just a dash of intuition and a lot of luck.

I do have one more thing to figure out. It has to do with preserving the points of the narrow black border and it just may involve some paper piecing. Have I piqued your curiosity? I hope so! Please come back in a few days to see what I’m talking about.