The Blogger's Quilt Festival, My Entry Sapphire Star

Sapphire Star Front

 This is my contribution to the Blogger's Quilt Festival, an online quilt festival   What a wonderful way to share your work and to view the work of others, an opportunity for inspiration.



I am always amazed at the beautiful quilts that men and women create, each one is different and has the makers imprint on it.

Sapphire Star Back

This quilt top was originally started as a swap project for the Make Mine Modern swap on Flickr.  After getting the top posted and looking at it, relative to my partner's website, I made the decision that I needed to scrap this project and make something else that might be more to her liking.  Happy with the top, I decided to finish it for a local quilt show and at that point to create a backing that would be reflective of the top.  Both the top and the back are paper pieced.  The top is the Millennium Star pattern, taken from Peggy Martin's book Quick-Strip Paper Piecing and the backing is my own design which I created using my ElectricQuilt 6 software.  I have designed lots of blocks on my EQ6 but this was the first paper pieced block design and I was so delighted with how easy it was to execute and how precisely it all came out.  What I designed in the software exactly came out on my quilt!

When I finished the top and the back, I started auditioning binding fabrics, I didn't want something that would take away from the effect.   I wanted a sense of this being one star in the midst of the heavens.  We live in the forest in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.  Each night my husband and I like to go out and get into our hot tub and stare up at the sky.  Because there are no lights to dim the sky, the stars look like you could reach out and touch them, some brighter and appearing closer than others and yet there are so many that you could not count them all.  This Sapphire Star is that bright star in the heavens, you notice it more than the others and yet you notice there are so many surrounding it.  In the process of auditioning fabrics, I decided to post my choices on Flickr and see what the "community" had to say about the different options.  That was an exciting process for me, a validation if you will of my selections and a wonderful assist in a direction that provided excitement to the binding.  They say too many cook spoil the soup, but in this case it was delightful to have that input.  Ultimately it would be my choice, but they confirmed the direction that I was leaning.

The online quilting experience for me has been a joyful eye opener.  Since we live remotely, it's not an option that I elect to join a quilting guild, driving back into town on a Monday night after working all day and coming home is not my idea of quilting fun.  So I have been missing that sense of community and inspiration that comes from participating in a guild.  Online bloggers and Flickr have filled that void and more, they have spurred my imagination and creativity into places that I would not normally explore, they have challenged me and helped me to stretch.  My skills have grown and I think that I have helped others as well, develop their skills and learn new techniques.  As a 58 year old woman, this has been a wonderful journey which I envision will continue for many years.  Where can you converse with someone on the other side of the world about a project that you are working on, or learn a new technique from them...it's an amazing opportunity for growth.

So here I am, entering my little Sapphire Star into the Blogger's Quilt Festival, another leg on this journey!