Dragging Myself Through May

I've been neglecting my blog this month, as one faithful reader reminded me this week. It isn't because I haven't been knitting, though my knitting time has been limited by end-of-year events and other time conflicts. In fact, I've been doing a great job of finishing stuff. I think the biggest impediment to blogging has been end-of-year letdown and the gray weather. I blog over breakfast, you see, and I've been having a hard time getting up in the morning the past few weeks. At first it was from fighting off a late spring cold, but now I think it is just the chance to slow down a bit and the fact that we've had so much rain and overcast weather -- the one sunny morning we had last week, I bounced out of bed and felt great. That was a week ago.

But, as I said, I've finished some projects and promised to share one with you. It has been a long time coming, I know. This is a quilt for one of my sisters that has a story behind it. When I was in college, I made her a quilt to take to college (she's 4 years younger than me, so was a senior in high school when I was a senior in college). The quilt was simple -- it had four stripes of color (each was a quarter of the quilt) and on each stripe there was a large star appliqued and satin-stitched. The stars were arranged diagonally. If I remember correctly, the quilt was red, green, yellow, and white. Well, that quilt eventually disintegrated. It was made in 1980 when the fabric available for quilting was pretty poor quality (not only was that all I could afford, but, truly, there was nothing else available to me), and polyester thread was also the only sewing thread available. Many quilters now know that polyester thread will cut and shred your fabric over time and we are fortunate to have beautiful all-cotton fabric and a variety of cotton threads to sew with. And, the internet makes it possible to find and get what you need so easily!

A few years back, I was at the Maine Quilts show and a vendor had a sample quilt hanging in their booth which had large (12" x 12"?) squares, each with a large star in them. But, instead of being appliqued, they were pieced! I immediately thought of my sister (who has always loved stars, hence the theme) and purchased the pattern. She came to the fabric store with me and picked out a fabric she liked, which I then used as a basis for choosing the rest of the fabrics for the quilt, pulling on the colors in the original fabric. The result is a quilt I thoroughly enjoyed working on and finally put the finishing touches on last weekend, right before my sister was coming to spend a night at our house. Here are photos of the FO (finished object):

The best part about this? I had double what I needed to make the quilt, so have another set of blocks made and will be making them into a quilt for myself ...soon. I ended up loving the fabrics so much that without that "quilt in reserve," it would have been extremely hard to give this quilt away, even to my sister :)