Star Families

This quilt has so many tangents. The damn thing took me to India before I landed at Windsor. 

Let me start from the beginning... last summer I showed up for a sew-in with my awesome Cambridge Modern Quilt Guild buddies, and this girl Rebecca was just finishing up this quilt top for a friend:

And I was like, I could never do that! I am a solids person. I cannot put patterns together for the life of me. Anything more than three fabrics and I have no confidence that it's going to work. But these were so pretty. And bright. And varied. And they worked. So Rebecca passed on her leftover fat eighths, and I started following Amy Butler, the designer of these glorious fabrics on Insta. Who soon after, posted about a fabric trip to India, just as my mother in law and I were discussing going on a trip together. Cue fabric-y Jaipur photos:

I actually still have dreams about these piles of hand-quilted blankets made out of old saris. It was the best day. 

A week later I got to attend QuiltCon in Pasadena. The highlight was a workshop on designing quilts with Illustrator. It was taught by Daisy Aschehoug, and it was awesome. Her final words: "Don't wait more than 12 hours to practice what we just did."

On the way home on Sunday, I clumsily got this to kind of work:

I pulled out Rebecca's old fat eighths and figured out the sewing order. I liked her white background but when I took my scraps to the Kona section, this blue/gray Windsor (maybe it's blue/GREY?) was calling my name, and I decided on a lighter tone in the middle.

I wasn't sure how I was going to quilt it, or where it would end up, it was more of an experiment. Then I learned that a friend's daughter was dealing with a serious illness. This little girl is a real spitfire, and I liked the idea of her star burning bright, lighting up the night, surrounded by all her people forming a bright and protective ring around her. 

I backed it with minky, because it's softer than unicorn eyelashes. Went to a Kathy Graves talk where she recommended Shannon Minky because it only stretches in one direction, and not very dramatically. I love that it comes in so many colors, but raspberry is my favorite! 

Then I tied it with coral wool embroidery floss. I'm a total tied quilt convert when it comes to comfort, it's just so drapey it makes you want to curl up under it and go to sleep.

And off it goes. Now, onto the next challenge!