Journal quilt progress

Like the red set and the yellow set, I'm making the blue set for this year's  Contemporary Quilt JQ challenge all at once. When I laid out the strips several weeks ago, they looked like this -

Too complicated, too "messy"!  I put them away carefully, knowing this was just a first thought.

When I revisited them, it was easy enough to discard a lot of the fussier strips and vary the sizes of strips in each quilt - and once the "black stars" were added, they sort of made sense -

Even though none of the "star" arrangements conforms to a named constellation, they will (randomly) be named after constellations. First, though, they need to be trimmed to size and the borders satin-stitched.

I used bits of an old towel for the wadding and about halfway along in the stitching of the first quiltlet noticed that it was shifting sideways somewhat alarmingly. After unpicking everything I carefully stitched the towelling to the backing, vertically, at 1" intervals. This did the trick. There wasn't a lot of extra fabric for the borders, and I really didn't want to start completely afresh to get it the right size.

What I'd thought of as dark suns (or moons, or stars) rising over the horizon of some intergalactic landscape seems in this set of JQs to be more like black holes. (Or floaters in ancient eyes.) Rather than tucking the black dots into the next strip (working downwards), I put most on top and caught them into the stitching. Some were added afterwards with different colours of thread.

This made for a lot of ends to be tied and buried!