Star of Wonder

Yesterday I placed in the mail the first completed Star of Wonder project! I'm so excited to be nearly finished with these projects. The next time I decide that it is wise to make 3 of something, someone please knock me upside the head! I'm sewing the binding on the second one, and the third is almost completely quilted.

The pattern for this was called "Reason for the Season," uses Nancy Halvorsen's "Star of Wonder" panel, and is free from Quiltmaker online. I think it's probably important to remember that you sometimes get what you pay for. The pattern had a few issues - why in the world would you let the squares in a square float around the border? I trimmed mine all down. And of course, their math was a bit fuzzy - add in spacers to make things fit, which I do understand when you are using a panel - but if you squared the blocks down, you were able to get in one full additional block on each side, and had a much smaller spacer segment as a result. I'm all in favor of using as many blocks as possible and fewer spaces. This was my first time using a panel this large and building a lot of quilt around it, rather than simply quilting the panel with some unpieced borders. Panels are not always square! Nor are the lines on them necessarily straight. I found that annoying, but I guess just one of those things you have no choice but to deal with if you want to use panels.

As you can see since my last progress photo, I sewed on the 36 buttons and tacked down the flange so that it "wobbles" back and forth. It's a very nice design element, and not as time-consuming as it might have been, given that Mary or Sandi suggested that I use the button sew-on program on my sewing machine! I honestly had no idea there was such a feature and it never occurred to me to sew on buttons with my sewing machine, so I'm forever in their debt for saving me a ton of time in getting those buttons sewn on! I took the same approach to tacking down the flange in the opposite position - just set a narrow zigzag with the feed dogs down and a quilting foot and I was good to go!

I'm hoping to get the second one bound so I can show it at our quilt guild meeting tomorrow night and to its new owner on Thursday, but we'll see how I do. And if I can finalize the third over the long holiday weekend, that will be awesome!