Gold--

Finished quilt after blocking

Our book club read "Tales of the Yukon" by Robert Service. It is a book of poetry. I'm not excited about reading poetry. I've tried several times to enjoy poetry. . .it is not for me! The person who lead the discussions for this book also tasked us to write a poem. For me, writing poetry ranks even less on the scale than reading it does! Sigh. . .

Belonging to the group and participating in the activities has pushed me outside of my comfortable "box" more times than I can recount. In the end, there was one poem in the book that inspired me. It was a poem about the landscape which made me think of stars in the sky against a backdrop of snow. I've considered stars as bits of gold and those thoughts were the inspiration behind this project.

Auditioning the "coverage" strip

I did write a poem:

White snow glows

on a moonlight night.

Beautiful!

The entire project came from scraps. The design was from "Little Lone Star Quilts" by Lorraine Olson. The star was paper pieced. The diamond border, which is also paper pieced, took forever!

I quilted a grid design in the background fabric. The piece
was a little wonky so I soaked it to block it. The red fabric that I used as the star points bled on the background. I tried a variety of methods to remove the bleeding. While the bleeding was less definite, it was still evident.

Finished front

I considered my options and decided I could put a sashing around the star. I auditioned a variety of fabrics; but, went with a gold fabric. While I would have preferred no strip or a narrower strip, the wider strip covered the majority of the bleeding evidence.

To secure the strip, I hand sewed it in place. I liked how the yellow added to the effect of the star actually glowing. Additionally, the yellow/gold colored strip went well with the gold theme in the book. It was a fix that worked! 

It still was a little wonky; but, I decided a little wonky was better than any more bleeding! The piece measures 13 inches by 13 inches. I finished it in March of 2015. 

Label

I'd always thought that I would make another miniature quilt; but, I haven't! Miniature projects, while taking less fabric than larger projects, still take a lot of time! Accuracy of cutting strips, sewing seam allowances becomes even more important as the pieces become smaller.

I did enter this piece is several quilt shows. It won a blue ribbon (first place) at one show. I share this information because in none of the judges' comments was there a mention of the fabric bleeding. 

Hanging at a show

The judges' did comment that the yellow strip while unexpected added to the overall appearance of the piece. The comments included that the edges should be straight. There was a couple comments that there should have been more space between the gold strip and the diamond border and there were a couple comments that the spacing was good. 

There were no comments about fabric bleeding. It all worked out! 

This is my fourth post this month documenting past book club quilts. If you missed a post you can click the links and read the posts: Old Sames; Reflections; More Than Black and White. Documenting four posts was goal number two in my May list.

Because this project is all from scraps, I'm linking to Cynthia's blog at Oh Scrap/Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework.