Eastwood Stars Wedding quilt, finished!

In late 2004 we moved from country Victoria to Sydney and I attending the Hunters Hill Quilters.  Then I got a job and had to find a night group.   So I joined Eastwood Patchwork Quilters, who are sufficiently large enough to warrant one night and two day meetings, weekly!   We got married in 2005, so I hadn't been a member very long, but these generous ladies presented me with 50 blocks to help celebrate our wedding.   The four pointed starts are largely hand pieced (a specialty of many of the Eastwood quilters) and the theme was "country", so you can see some blocks have chooks and others houses, all very appropriate as DH had chooks before we moved! 

 I was so thrilled with the blocks that I went especially went to a hand quilting class, thinking that I would hand quilt the top.  But squeezing in a class BEFORE I got married was a bad idea, as I was so busy organising a wedding (in Victoria) from Sydney that I didn't even get started on the piecing.  And then I came home from our honeymoon pregnant!  When I was six months pregnant we got given notice to move out of our apartment, a blessing in the long run, but a double dose of stress at the time. So before DS1 was born I went on a sewing frenzy (he was late) and finished and started lots of projects.  I brought a red/beige print and pieced the top together on the diagonal.  It looked awful, so it went into the cupboard and waited.  It waited there while we moved to Adelaide, spent 12 months looking for a house to buy, got pregnant again and moved into our now home just a few months before the arrival of DS2.  Somewhere during this time I unpicked the blocks, brought another print (red again), started cutting out the blocks and again put it aside.  

 Needless to say its been a thrill to finally finish this quilt.  The journey of this quilt will always be dear to me, because it is a record of our first five and half years of marriage and the friendships I have made as a quilter.  All fifty of the stars are included in the quilt, with the 50th forming part of the label - because it was the only one with dark background, which worked out perfectly with the backing I choose. 

 I love the backing, it has a lovely small print in the same blue/grey as the top and it shows up MY quilting very nicely.  My machine quilting isn't fantastic, but I was determined to quilt it myself and I knew that any attempts at hand quilting  would drag out for another five and half years!

The final part to this story ... this quilt won me the Presidents Encouragement Award at the South Australian Quilters Guild meeting for show and tell last Thursday night - our president said that she could relate to the story of this quilt!   

Happy quilting Sue.