This is the third project I’ve completed since I started sewing with the Thursday group. I originally thought I would donate this to the Member Appreciation event at Cranberry Hall (the backing is some musical-notation fabric) but once it was done I decided I wanted to keep it for myself.

The star itself is paper pieced and the quilting idea for the corners came from an on-line free-motion quilting challenge I’m keeping track of. I added some meandering in the set-in triangle pieces around the star. The loops in the border came from a quilting book I have in my own library and the quilting in the yellow corners is my own design.

We have two months between miniature quilt meetings so why am I always working on my project in the few days before each meeting?

The rail-fence blocks were done a long time ago – leftover scraps from a table runner, a chair cover and a bunch of neutrals I had in my bin. I always intended to make something with them and when I looked for a project for our meeting the idea of getting a bin of blocks off my table really appealed.

I made the pattern up myself. I was hoping for more of a shadow box look to the blocks; perhaps I need to have the border colours the same width. I think my Second Time Around (Splendid Sampler) will be done with shadow boxes so I’ll find a different tutorial when I start putting those together. I have to admit though that when I see the photo it does give a bit of the effect I was going for.

The “feathers” (and I use the term loosely) were my first attempt at them. Some are better than others but since I was keeping this for myself I decided they were good enough.

The name of the quilt comes from the 40 pieces of fabric that make up the centre squares in each of the blocks.

In 2016 our Guild hosted an event involving the Guilds on the Island and along the Sunshine Coast. I used some of these same blocks in a miniature quilt that was part of a raffle basket.

I was going through some files on my computer and realized I had never featured my Celtic Crystals quilt. This surprises me as it is probably my most ambitious quilt to date (and it may not ever be topped).

This was a block of the month that I purchased from one of our local quilt shops (no longer in business). Of course I didn’t keep up with those blocks. A quick look through previous posts says that I finished Block 1 in September of 2013 – it was pretty much downhill from there! I remember that the block didn’t finish to the right size and it had to be taken apart and redone – no wonder I was put off the whole thing.

The quilt is done entirely in batiks; I love the colours in batiks but it isn’t my favourite fabric to work with. I pre-washed all the fabric but I did it all in one batch so I worried for most of the piecing that I had enough of the right colours to finish all the blocks, and that I was using the right colours in each block. I needn’t have worried as I had lots of fabric left.

I was able to find some post from Superior Threads that showed how they quilted each block. Although I wasn’t able to follow their exact plan it certainly gave me some inspiration and courage to attempt a few new designs.

The quilt hung in the 2017 Quilt Show and now has a permanent place in my stitching room on Texada. And it wasn’t until our Christmas trip that I noticed I had put something together wrong. Too late to change it – do you see the problem?