string star love

Did you know I loved string pieced stars?

I actually thought I'd written about my love affair with string stars but I haven't ...weird...maybe I dreamt that I had. No matter. After reading Tim's post about the vintage stars he recently purchased, I was encouraged to drag out my collection of quilts, quilt tops and random blocks and maul them for a while, taking the opportunity to photograph them anew.

Last year I had the distinct pleasure to correspond for a bit with Nancy Ray a devoted collector of all quilts stringy. A small part of Nancy's extensive collection is featured in Gwen Marston's Liberated String Quilts if you love string quilts this book is a must have. But I digress...

First...
This little quilt was a gift from a quilting friend...a single block left over from a top she pieced from vintage blocks, it is the only 6 point string star I own...all others are of the 8 pointed persuasion....gee I've had it for so long I really need to get it bound.

Nice orange...

Next up.

You may have noticed this star quilt on my sidebar...a time span quilt over 100 years, the main star was originally made in 1910 or thereabouts (based on the newspaper foundations), also purchased from eBay. It required a little resewing and resizing in order to sit flat, (OK a lot) then I pieced the smaller satellite stars from scraps of antique fabric over paper to match. All the background fabrics are antique from the era as well...the only new fabrics are the backing and binding. Finished 2010. Click on the sidebar pic it will take you to a Picasa album of more photos.

Basted and ready to quilt this quilt top was finished around 2002-ish.

The blocks were purchased from eBay, dating around 1880, the myriad indigo fabrics were what initially attracted me. Then when you look closely you see more and more treasures.

 A few star tips needed repairing ...done with repros before I had any real antique fabric to use.

 

Set with reproduction shirtings and conversationals for fun, a reproduction mid blue was used for the sashing strips. The little sashing stars were pieced from an antique red fabric rescued from an old quilt backing....it ran so much when washed I thought I would never be able to use it!!

I had this machine basted, but plan to take it undone and change the batting...it is the same cotton batt as the 1910 quilt above  and although I like the flat result, the quilting experience wasn't nice. I did whinge. A lot.

These guys were also an eBay find.

 9 blocks with super skinny strings with that extra zing of some chrome yellow.

 

 Interestingly the setting squares/triangles are dark.

Look at some of the treasures ... I haven't decided how to set these into a top yet, but have recently seen a neat setting I might audition.

Hope you enjoyed this revelation of my stringy obsession. There's more...a vintage '30's string star top with Chinese coins/String border and more old blocks...

bordering on...

...finished.

Well...the Dutch Chintz border started at the beginning of the year is finished! Actual sewing time was quite quick....just holidays and summer laziness got in the way to make it a longer process. You can see my post on reverse appliqué here.

Saturday was our first class of the year with Marg Sampson at Material Obsession and it was lovely to get back into the sewing swing and be inspired by everyone's work. Organized Ms Linen and Raspberry has already written about our day so hop on over and see Jean's lovely appliqué and Kathy has also posted some pics here.  I'm often too brain-dead to take many photos at our workshops... duh.

...finishing...

After much to-ing and fro-ing a final border design has been settled upon for Jane. Based on a border from an old English Chintz quilt seen at Peppergreen Antiques, we simply had to make use of the luscious blue birds for the dog-tooth. A change of background fabric for some texture and related but more oatmealy colour will give this final (hooray!) wide border a bit of interest. More applique shapes to come between the doggy teeth.Need to get back to MO before the blue birds of happiness are sold out...because of course I didn't buy enough, amazing just how much fabric goes into a border.

I wrote this post yesterday but couldn't send the pics from my new iPhone to the laptop...it's taken me this long to crunch the technology, so hence the weird message some of you may have received from blogger yesterday...soz.