A Year Of Stars Quiltalong with Natalia Bonner - January

I am participating in Natalia Bonner's 'A Year of Stars' quiltalong. If you are interested - it is not too late, as the actual quilting has just begun and it is going to be running for the entire year. Natalia is also running YouTube tutorials on how to put the blocks together. I have not watched these as I purchased the accompanying Workbook last year to get going on the blocks as I knew this would take me a long time to piece.

Most of the last week was stitching-in-the-ditch with invisible thread to stabilize the quilt. In case you wondered how I resolved the issue of whether or not to go around every single element - I did a partial stitch-in-the-ditch, i.e. stitched around all the major seams and some of the seams in the blocks where it mattered in terms of colour. As I am stitching along in an off white Aurifil thread I was mindful of stitching the seams of darker colours down with the invisible thread and leaving the seams where I can get away with white thread for  when we get to that block. That seems to be working.

While a bit out of practice, I got into the groove of it pretty quickly. Did not follow Natalia's video on how to stitch this out in one continuous go as I would have had to stop the video every 2 seconds. I made some mistakes and had several stops and starts when starting off but then 'got' it and moved purposefully around the block stitching those lines. The only issue I had was the deep purple colour and the white thread. In order not to break thread every few minutes I had to travel along the ditch to get to the next part and initially that was a bit of a nightmare. Learned something though...I have become so used to the Bernina's stitch regulator that I forgot I actual have the option of using the manual mode. So, whenever I hit the dark purple fabric in the ditch I switched over to the Manual mode, carefully stitching along. Found that I had much better control this way. In terms of rulers, I used my trusted Handiquilter Ditch Ruler for the straight lines and one of Lisa Calle's Pro Echo rulers for the curves.

Turned out really pretty, I particularly like the crossed lines in the white triangles...looks very effective.

In case you have not heard, Natalia is also running a Border and Sashing Online Class in March of this year. Looks great and no doubt there will be a lot of  inspiration and learning in that. This is my second quiltalong with Natalia and while I am tempted, I just have too many other things on the go this year and need to stay focussed.

On the home front, I finished testing my new pattern...now it is just a matter of putting the quilt together, quilting and binding it while at the same time writing the pattern up. This should take probably another 2 - 3 weeks and then its onto the next pattern.

Also, look what arrived today

Could not resist getting another E2E design from Urban Elementz. Undecided at the moment whether I use that for the new pattern...might be too distracting as the quilt features a few stars, so it would be more of the same and I usually like to pair lots of angular structures with more of a curvy and flowing design. We'll see...not there yet.

Karin