Sparkle mailed

My long nightmare concluded late last month, when finally I finished this monster:

Sparkle punch quilt (Oh Fransson quiltalong)
April 2012

I love the way it turned out, but I won't lie - it was painful.  It took a lot longer than I expected, and I had to take a few breaks from it.

I used the instructions from the Oh Fransson quilt-along to piece the top.

My main stumbling block was the block count.   Specifically, there are 480 individual 3.5" blocks in the final quilt.   Which required cutting ~400 white squares, plus ~400 colored squares for the stars.

maybe 25% of the white squares

The 400 star-point blocks had to be pieced, pressed, and trimmed to square.  Which took for-FREAKING-ever and was (let's not sugar-coat) complete drudgery.

Luckily, I have HBO in the basement.  At times, I even had company.

sadly, he's too young to iron for me.
he is getting great at the foot pedal.

Another annoyance was that once this was arranged on my design wall, I really couldn't move any part of it, for fear of messing up the layout.   This made working on other projects harder, which didn't help my flagging morale.

chunks coming together

But it's done, so I won't dwell.  (too late!)

actual sunshine, people

Elizabeth Hartman suggested a spiky stipple for the quilting.   I'm new to free motion and am trying to get comfortable with traditional stippling, so I went with an overall traditional curvy stipple instead.

did a few fussy star centers, like this pretty cameo

For the back, I found a really pretty grey print from Tanya Whelan's Dolce line.   I love using large-scale prints like this as backings - would've been a shame to hack this up.   

 I bound the quilt in Denyse Schmidt's Hope Valley Wallflower print (piney woods colorway).

 I was so relieved to be done, I threw the quilt right into my yard.   Just kidding.

This one's on my way to my friend Arielle in Kansas City.  She is the only person I know who could be trusted with a couch-sized white quilt!   (certainly not safe in my house.....)