Finishing the stars

It's great having the Tour de France on late at night to watch while I quilt (live coverage starts at about 9.30pm, about an hour or so into the race, and goes through until the finish 1 or 2am and it has been especially enjoyable so far with an Australian winning yesterday, the Australian team winning today, and an Australian in the maillot jaune from tomorrow.

I got the quilt sandwiched this evening and spent a while playing with different threads and colours. I decided not to quilt the white sections at all - either the pieced ones or the wholecloth ones. I settled on a deep mulberry Aurifil 50wt cotton in what's basically a darker shade of the pink solid fabric for the wholecloth pink sections - pink enough to obviously match, but dark enough to be a secondary feature visible on further inspection rather than dominating.

I used a Hera marker, small ruler and the piecing lines to mark in the rest of the block (just the one so far). The Hera marker shows really nicely on dark solids, and there's no worry about removing the marks after quilting.

Then I threaded the machine with the mulberry Aurifil and a matching BottomLine thread in the bobbin and quilted the wholecloth sections of the star block. the areas which are pieced white and black will remain unquilted, but I did quilt the 'seams' between the white and black pieces.

I'm yet to decide how many blocks I'll quilt like this; I'll do the four like the one shown, and the centre one with an all-black centre, and probably the eight half-blocks, but probably not the eight plain blocks. Then I'll go back and quilt the pink solid sections using a matching pink Glide thread with the same pattern.