Constellation

This is the first year for a Modern Quilt category in the Iowa State Fair.  The Des Moines Modern Quilt Guild is sponsoring a prize for the blue ribbon winner.  We also agreed we should all try to enter something so that the new modern category is well represented.  This will be my first entry in the fair.  The drop off is tomorrow and I'm getting progressively more nervous.  My entry is a quilt I'm calling Constellation.

This quilt started as a scrap busting project.  I used one of many of the fabrics in my scrap bins.  I've been working on this quilt as a leader ender project for more than a year.  I'm not sure when I would have wrapped this up, if I hadn't decided to enter it in the fair.

I love the texture the dense quilting in the negative space provides.  I quilted this on my home machine, rather than the long arm, because I felt like I had more control for the precision needed.  I used white Superior So Fine in the white areas and nothing on the prints.  I didn't want to distract from the prints and there was no way I could have matched all the colors.

One of the judging requirements is the use of negative space.  I thought doing something interesting with the quilting in the negative space would be a good idea.  I quilted the space in between the wonky stars in a star burst pattern and I continued that to the negative space in the edges.  I created phantom stars in the quilting.

 I am nervous about using pigments to mark quilting lines and the hera marker doesn't show up very well on white.  I finally came up with the idea of just using pins to mark where the phantom star points would be.  It was easy to mark and easy to remove.

I went with a white binding because I thought it was the more modern choice and enhanced the negative space.  If I had been making this quilt just for myself, I would have gone with a rainbow stripe.