Millennium Star - Bloggers Quilt Festival

Greetings! I'm so pleased to be participating in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival for the first time this year, run by Amy at Amy's Creative Side. I'm entering this quilt into the Home Machine Quilted Category. If you click on over, you will find lots of great quilts to look at. You can also head HERE to nominate your favourites, and then check back on 22 May to vote.

I made this quilt for a swap run on Instagram. (Click on any of the photos for a larger view.) The centre of the quilt is a paper foundation piecing pattern by Peggy Martin called Millennium Star. I changed the orientation to have the point at the top so that I'd have lots of room in the corners for the spiders, and the webs I had planned for the quilting.

The skull and spider are pieced into the quilt, both taken from a piece of fabric from the Nevermore collection by Gillian Fullard. The little spiders running up from the bottom right are also pieced in from the same fabric.

My first step for the quilting was to stitch in the ditch of the star seams, and roughly a quarter inch away from the seams in the purple section. Then, I marked the spines of the feathers with chalk and proceeded to quilt them, followed by the outlining of the centre piece, and then the spider webs. Last of all came the pebbling. All that black-on-black was very hard on the eyes, but so worth it for the texture.

I ended up adding the straight lines in the purple section right at the end, as it was a little loose and puffy there for my liking, and I wanted it to be flatter to allow the star to pop out even more.

Finishing the quilt with a flanged binding was a must as far as I was concerned, and I'm really pleased with how it frames the quilt.

The quilt finishes at a touch under 25" square. The quilting is mostly done with Aurifil 50wt thread and all done on my Brother NX-200 sewing machine. The black quilting took a LOT of thread - I went through over four bobbins! I also went through rather a lot of purple thread for the feathers.

I used white cotton batting behind the star, and black batting of a cotton-polyester blend for the quilt as a whole. I pre-washed all the batting.

I admit to being rather proud of this quilt, and completely smitten. Parting with it was hard, but the fact that it has gone to a fellow patchwork quilter is, I think, wonderful, and I'm happy to report that she loved the quilt.

Thanks for stopping by to see my quilt. Don't forget to head over and nominate your favourites and then check back again to vote on 22 May. You can also enter to win some prizes by commenting on the main Festival Post.

Bye for now,

Hope x