Star Light Star Dark {Finished Quilt}
I am working my way through my stack of completed quilt tops and turning them into finished quilts. Today I am super excited to share my Star Light Star Dark QAL finish!
Because I have a pretty big backlog of quilts to complete at the moment, and because I have many other pulls for my time (hosting the 2016 Cloud9 New Block Blog Hop was awesome but took a lot of time and effort at my computer, and I am wrapping up my own free Snowflake Shimmer QAL, too…), I started quilting my Star Light Star Dark quilt with the intention of keeping it simple and getting it done. So, knowing I had a little over 1 hour to work on the quilting, I wound 2 bobbins, loaded the quilt sideways on my long arm, and started with some really loose straight line quilting from side to side (so the the final lines would end up up and down on the quilt). Needless to say, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and ran out of my 2 bobbins before I was even 1/3rd of the way through the quilting. And I ran out of time. The quilt gets what the quilt wants, yes? LOL
Since I had started with such widely spaced lines (somewhere around 1 to 1.5 inch organic spacing), I first cut those in half. And then in half again… sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. And then I decided to throw in a few free motion motifs between the lines; sometimes I quilted between the wider spaced lines, sometimes I squeezed between the more narrow lines.
When selecting the thread color for quilting, I came across a 50wt Aurifil spool that just sang to me: 2870 (Green). As much as it would seem a bright green would stand out across the lighter colors or contrast with the deeper blue in the quilt, it blends in and helps pull the scrappy colors of the quilt top together, I think.
The quilt back is pieced Michael Miller Cotton Couture in Wave with a slice of Kona Bluegrass. I love the texture and quilting detail that can be seen against the solid backing!
Thankfully, instead of leaving the quilt unfinished and waiting for the final quilting for a week as I had feared, I was able to sneak in the finishing of the quilting the next morning. I did have to set it aside for finishing (trimming and binding), but I only used up 3 more bobbins completing the quilting.
Sticking with the green theme, I chose to bind the quilt with a continuous (non-scrappy) binding in dark green using one of the dark green prints from the quilt top (a print from Connecting Threads), and I used the same 50wt Aurifil 2870 to machine stitch it to the quilt. My version of the Star Light Star Dark quilt finished at 45-inches wide by 51-inches long.
Linking up with Finish it Friday and Jess @Quilty Habit for the final Star Light Star Dark link party!
