My parenting cunning-ness has developed somewhat, as I did manage to escape the "worst" of the birthday activities and visit with my favourite patchwork shop {The Country Yard} while they held their annual exhibition. I had a few quilts to display - in fact, I had my own room! {Which coincidentally had the perfect colour scheme... how I wish I had remembered to use my camera}. I did come home with a few new lengths of fabric and a few new spools of thread... so now I have no excuses...
Today has been recovery day... a bit of this... a bit of that.
One of the spools was destined for this one... so I've been busy basting and marking, and finally a few stitches...
Do you remember this bundle?
Well, I did some googling, and found a design I really liked. After some detective work (thanks to Bonnie at Clothworks who helped with the pattern identification) I tracked down the pattern, purchased and downloaded it. Perfect large areas to highlight the feature fabrics... plenty of smaller areas to use my accent solids...
Until I turned to the quilt assembly instructions... not quite the large areas I was expecting! 2.5" strips are just not going to work with my fabrics... I don't know about you - but these instructions scare me.
While I was hunting down the pattern, I drafted up one of the star blocks from "Modern Blocks" (you know the one with three different sized stars ), upsized the block to 50" and rotated four blocks. It just looks a little bit too much like the Constellation quilt top I have just finished.
Somewhere between these two patterns I know there is a meeting point... I just need to work out how to achieve it. Luckily tomorrow is a holiday so I have an extra day to play in my shed!
6 comments:
What horrible looking instructions! Who would want to piece all those seams when you don't need to. I took some photos of your 'room' at country yard so I'll email them to you :-)
First, congratulations on your first 10 years as a mom :). How clever of you to escape the party planning go do something quilt related instead. Please share your trick :) secondly, awful, scary pattern. I'm sure you will figure something out. Maybe a few ideas from the book Modern Quilting. It has a very similar block. Try searching for stargazer block and you'll find it.
Here :). The book is called Modern Blocks of course. Here's Debbie's version of it. http://aquilterstable.blogspot.dk/2012/08/august-bee-blocks.html
Remember that math is our friend, and the scary piecing instructions are easy to fix. I find it easiest to take a piece of graph paper (or EXCEL on the computer) and draft the top as big squares & triangles. Look at your measurements, add the appropriate seam allowances and you'll be off and running. Yes, even those diagonal lines will be easy to figure and sew. You can do it.
Well, I guess they don't call it patchwork for no reason….! But I agree, those are some scary instructions!
Gobsmacked!! I am sure you will have fun sorting it out!!!
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