Galaxy Quilt: Finished and Shipped

 

The Galaxy quilt is complete and in the clutches of the U.S. Postal Service. I hope it makes its way to my DQS 8 partner in good speed, or at least the 2-3 days priority mail is supposed to take.

My partner expressed an appreciation for the brown/aqua/cream/red combination (and some others, but I went with this one). I've seen aqua and red pop up all over the quilt blogosphere, and it looks sharp. I like that it works as well with chocolatey brown as it would with a gray.

I made 7 wonky stars, originally thinking they would all fit on the front in some sort of random pattern. Had I made all small wonky stars, that might have worked. But the largest turned out to be 15" square and that created problems. As it is, the quilt is a smidgen oversized, clocking in at 27" square rather than the upper limit of 24" square. I hope my partner doesn't mind.

As a result, I used 4 of the stars on the front and 4 on the back. I wanted a decent amount of negative space, and I like how it turned out. In order to make sure there was some red on the back as well as the front, I added the red strip and placed the label on a red rectangle.

I quilted 1/4" away from each of the stars in the front (using aqua thread around the red stars and red thread around the aqua stars). The I opted for swirly filigree quilting in brown thread on the brown background. This is the first time I've separated out an element and quilted it differently. I think it might be better on a quilt with one fabric on the back, but I still like it.

This might be my favorite star. I like the mix of elpogated and squat points. Piecing the quilt together as tricky because I wanted some of the stars on an angle. If I were confident in foundation piecing, that might have been a better option. Instead, I pieced and cut and pieced and trimmed and pieced and cut until satisfied. I didn't even watch any internet TV while I did it, lest I mess it up.

I love this Tina Givens watercolor-like fabric and used it for the binding. Like usual, I machine-stitched it all. This was a fun experiment and the DQS folk are a neat bunch. There's loads of inspiration bobbing around in the flickr pool.