Quilt Festival Reticent Stars

This is my entry in the Bloggers Quilt Festival in the wall hanging category. I have posted about it as I was working on it and when it was finished. In this post, I put it all together for the Bloggers Quilt Festival.
I named this "Reticent Stars"; although I wanted the stars to show up, I did not want them to be the main attraction. For that reason I quilted them with black thread and not metallic thread as I had intended. My original choice for a binding was solid black but when I was ready for the binding I changed my mind and went with the black and white stripe cut on the bias.

Reticent Stars 33 x 49

Here are some close up views of the quilting. The straight line quilting is about 1/2 inch apart and follows the overall shape of each diamond.
I belong to a group of fun and creative ladies who have been meeting for a few years to explore new techniques and avenues of creativity. We have always been rather loosely organized meeting as friends and not as an organized "group".

About 2 years ago we got together after a rather lengthy hiatus and  set a definite date each month to meet. We settled on a name "The Basement Diva's" and set some goals and challenges.

 

Here are the rules for our challenge.

The challenge shall be black and white and, if wanted, one other color. Color being defined as a color family. Quilters are to do something they have not done before using a book, pattern or tool that the quilter already has. No, that doesn't mean finish the thing, Yes, a book that has been used before can be used but not the same pattern in said book. No, it does not mean you can make "that pink quilt you made before, in black and white".
There is no size limitation or finish date established yet.
Quilter's should be ready to start, or have started at our next meeting in October.

We try to have as few rules as possible for our challenges so there were not many. Later we added an April meeting deadline to finish. You can see the Basement Diva's Challenge quilts here and here

 

I had the book "Quilts from a Different Angle" by Sarah Nephew and the smaller Clear view Triangle ruler to go with it. The publish date in the book is 1986 so I had it a long time (26 years can that be?).

 

I designed my quilt in EQ7 and I had many versions before I settled on one. the quilt I made evolved as I went along and I would go back and audition my revisions in EQ before proceeding. All final decisions were made on the design wall.

This was my start and I used most but not all of the fabrics that I cut, I  have a stack of leftovers and discards eliminations.

Sewing the diagonal rows together was a learning experience and sometimes a challenge as it was hard to tell at times if I had everything where it should be. As the rows were sewn they shrunk and when up on the design wall next to the unsewn rows I sometimes lost sight of where the pieces were in the overall pattern.

 

 Here is the back view of the top. I really did press all those seams open. When I work with triangles I have better results when I press the seams open; it  really is worth the extra effort.

 

 

 

 When I finally got it all together I made the changes in EQ to reflect the actual quilt and colored the EQ version with lighter values to save my ink and it be able to see quilting lines that I would draw on the printed quilt to experiment and as a guide when I started to sew.


I don't know why I never used my triangle rule until this challenge. I remember I was very enthusiastic to make something when I bought the book and ruler. I am probably going to do something again soon with the ruler and pair  up the triangles with hexagons and diamonds as I bought those rulers recently to go with the triangle ruler. I better not wait 26 years to start; I may not be sewing when I am 104.