Natalia Bonner's 'A Year of Stars'

Progress

Finished all of the framework for the sashings and borders. I do not have a huge curve ruler (Natalia used a huge curve for her quilt), hence I used my Pro Echo #12 ruler to put the scallops into the border. That was challenging enough! In the end I just made it fit. Not ideal as the curves were slightly different all over, but in the end I doubted that this would feature much. Having done this, I  realised that my curves were too shallow for putting feathers in there, so I had to come up with something else.

Decided to put Ribbon Candy in there which looks very nice indeed. Ribbon Candy has become one of my most used designs. So very versatile.

Then I went on and filled the remainder of the border with Stacked Swirls.  Look at that texture!

This was a bit of work but I thought that this was the ideal piece to further practice the design.

Stitched this out in a day and today started to fill in the sashings of the first completed row with pebbles

That's it, will now wait to complete the next three stars on top of this row to fill in the next section (I am trying to avoid uneven compaction as I go along as that makes it harder to quilt your designs out. 

Karin

Challenge Quilt

My week of leave was spent progressing the challenge quilt from my local HQ group. This was epic...

Arrived at those sections that were meant to have pebbles in there. So, I pebbled for almost an entire week as there were 8 sections of it. Absolute torture and my shoulder did not like it at all. Had to put in frequent breaks so as to not damage my shoulder any further (apparently I have got a frozen shoulder with a good dose of bursitis on top of it and now I am patiently waiting for it to thaw out 😅). I then decided that the sashing was puffing out too much and so I put a diamond design in there with the HQ Skinny ruler. Once that was done I felt that it needed some dressing up and so I put the ribbon candy design in there...and so it goes on! I now am stitching the sashing down with some narrow lines around the diamonds and that is doing the trick of making it nice and flat.
I am absolutely quilting the 'snot' out of this quilt. So far I have gone through at least 5 -6 bobbins of thread. Good learning as usual as I noticed that a slightly different coloured bobbin thread (both Aurifil 50/2) required an adjustment of the bobbin tension. I am definitely learning more and more about the tension on the HQ Sweet 16.

Karin