Alhambra Stars and the Slippery Slope of Perfectionism

...being a *really* long time in the making, because I kept having to fix prior decisions.

A year and a half ago my office had a silent auction for a charity fundraiser. I wasn’t in the office at the time, but I thought aha! I have a skill I can contribute here. So I entered “custom quilt, within one year…” as an auction item, knowing that my travel schedule was always going to be an impediment, but figuring that at least any potential bidders from work would understand that, and be cool with it.  (And shout out to one of our finance folks for pinging me during the day of the auction to keep me abreast of the exciting bidding war that was taking place, since I wasn't there to witness it.)

Thankfully, the auction winner, V, has been EXTREMELY patient with my itinerant lifestyle, even though I blew through the 1-year mark and then dawdled another 6 months (well, okay, for part of that I was not in the same country as my sewing machine, in all fairness).  And she had some great ideas for the pattern she was interested in, which were the Golden Ratio primarily and secondarily a vacation she took to the Alhambra... and voila! Let me announce, in what appears to be a trend of having one annual post, that A Star Is Born:

the stars are sewed / i've sent what's owed / (clap clap clap clap) / and now i'm back in Texas

In the end, even though I was mostly lurching from crisis to crisis trying to fix errors in judgement from the preceding step, the final product was.... nice.  I was proud of it, and I never want to see it again because it was so exasperating (aaaaand now I know how my parents probably felt about me during my high school years.)

And that's about the end of the story, unless you want to know the process, in which case... read on, pilgrim!

Just the facts, ma'am: 

• This is applique - I ironed WonderUnder onto chunks of fabric like I did for El Jefe’sFlag (the fabric here was 5 colors of Grunge), cut out the shapes from templates I created with craft plastic, and working outward from the small inner 8-point stars, centered the pattern on big dark navy squares, ironing on the orange/yellow stars and the (more faded blue) 5-point stars.
• At that point I sewed together my big navy squares on point, added setting triangles, and then ironed on the brighter blue 6-point stars (because those actually go across squares in the pattern, and are geometrically equal on either side of the seam).  
• Then I outlined all of the stars with 1/4" black fusible bias tape, which was ironed on, and then sewed on with a double stitch (alas, since I don't have a double needle on my Juki, that just meant I had to sew all of the bias tape twice.) This hid the raw edge on the star appliques, but it also made the for kind of a dense, heavy quilt - it started to feel a lot like jeans, what with the doubled fabric and the double-stitched tape on every "seam".  
• I only stitched the bias tape through the top layer/flimsy - then I made the quilt sandwich, and THEN I stitched each star itself in a matching thread to hold it in place through all layers, did one inside stitch-line around each navy negative space shape, and stippled the outside edge.
• I also for the first time included a contrasting flange on the binding. Go me!
• The back was a pieced-together piece of lighter blue double-gauze, my very favorite backing to use, for the snuggle factor.  And I even remembered to make the nap on the different pieces go in the same direction this time. 
• The binding was just slightly darker solid navy.  I figured the pattern was busy enough, so I didn't want to muck things up too much with the fabric.
• It was around 84x62 before washing, and shrunk down to just under 80x60 afterwards.
• I still can't take pictures worth a damn.

Stippled edges, flanged binding

The back, about halfway through outlining the stars

Once More, This Time With All the Angst I Went Through For No Reason: The star-tile-pattern on the left came from V, from her "Golden Mean Coloring Book," by Rafael Araujo, (which was a Kickstarter project! Very cool) as a possibility when we were discussing what she might like.  And the one on the right came from, uh, Pinterest, somewhere… and was promising because it can be divided into repeating squares that would enable me to create one template and use it as many times as I needed to get to the right size.  (You can see the dashed lines that divide this into squares if you blow it up: the 8-pointed star is the middle of the square.)

Pattern that V provided as an option...(Rafael Araujo)

Pattern I thought I could do.

For a color scheme, V gave me two different sets that both sounded cool: mostly green with purple or orange or yellow accents, or mostly blue with yellow or deep orange.  I opted for the latter... mostly because I have more blue fabric lying around, but also because it matched with my mental image of the Alhambra tile work (whether that's actually true, I dunno. I've never been there!) . Here are some color inspirations I had in mind:

stars

stars

and more stars

I also wanted to replicate the worn quality of the tiles, hence: Grunge fabrics.

If you take the pattern I settled on and blow it up at the FedEx Kinko's store, then you get a big ol' block for making templates that looks like this:

You can see here how the blocks in the above design repeat. I set mine on point.

I did try a variety of fabric combos, including the one with spots which was just a scrap test-block anyway, but definitely reinforced my decision to NOT go with patterned fabrics: 

An attempt at piecing the stars came first, as did this lurid spotty background fabric.

as usual 

the color selection

STRESSED ME OUT

Initially I thought I'd be able to make templates for hand-piecing, but when I tried that I realized I am a SHITTY HAND-PIECER.  The sharp angles of the star points resulted in irritating little tucks in the star-arm inside angles (the starmpits?) which I tried to fix and never could. Next!

Final colors selected....on to shitty hand-piecing!

The templates had promise, though. So instead of cutting out pieces to sew them back into squares, I just cut out squares, and then cut out star-parts to iron on top of them.

Step 1: find the center of the square. Step 2: center a star on your square. Steps 3 through infinity: Iron, iron, iron.

Below is 7 squares laid out. The top one needs its light blue corner 5-point stars. The one with the bright teal half-six-point-stars on the edges is the one I hand-pieced, but for the rest I waited until the big navy squares were sewn together and then ironed those brighter stars across the squares' seams.  Easy peasy!

Here the brighter teal blue stars are just lying on the top, where they will shortly be ironed into submission place.

I AM IRON MAN

Next up: how to make sure those suckers stayed down, and also was this pattern enough? The stars seemed ill-defined, like they needed the grout of the original tile work to help delineate where they were. I fretted. Eventually it seemed I could tidy up my raw edges, keep my stars aligned (ha!), and add a grout-like design element with some 1/4" bias tape, made all the more user-friendly by the good folks at Clover who have a fusible version (thanks, Clover!)

Cut the bias tape at a 45ish degree, and then attempt to match that angle for the piece on the other side (with mixed results.)

Starting to look kind of stained-glassy

Well duh, Astrid - you're still going to have to sew down the fusible bias tape, so it's not like you're getting out of any work by covering your raw edges this way.  AND, in the cases where the star points did not quite meet, and the tape didn't quite cover the edges, you experience slightly curled star points or edges anyway. Solution: sew EVERYTHING down REPEATEDLY so no one was going anywhere, ever.  And then stipple the ever-loving snot out of the edges, just to prove the point. TRY CURLING NOW, BEYOTCH.

In the end, it wasn't even that hard to do, but as I might have guessed, the figuring out things part,and going down wrong paths part, and the second-guessing myself endlessly part, and the wandering around for work part, got in the way of my deadline.  And I'm not really sure this is a quilt... or, at least, it's not patchwork since almost nothing is sewn together, just on top of one another.

But all's well that ends well. I have shipped it off to V (to the office - I had a moment of panic during which I thought "I haven't emailed her in awhile about this - I hope she still works here!")  I have several new techniques under my belt, and also like 7 extra spools of fusible 1/4" bias tape, and a new appreciation for Islamic geometry, and so I will count it as a success, even if it did take me 1.5 years to get here.

And maybe this year, I'll get more than one thing done.

Besos!

Astrid

(Linking up with Confession of a Scrap Addict's Friday Whoop Whoop)