Sugar Stars Hazel Quilt – Finished, with Lessons Learned

Well, remember how totally on FIRE I was a while back with my progress for the above Sugar Stars quilt? Then everyone was like – ‘Seriously? What happened to that quilt she was making? She never. Even. Published. The. Finish.’

It’s true – this is the first time I’m publishing my finished quilt because, as on fire as I was to get it finished, this happened:

Wouldn’t you freeze too?  The bottom line is that quilting, like life in general, presents us with brick walls. Sometimes we freeze because, doggone it, we just wanted to start something, move along with a comfortable sense of propulsion, and get it done so we can enjoy the pleasant fruits of our labor.  When we meet those brick walls, however, it sometimes becomes less about propulsion and more about learning something along the way.  My response to that? I didn’t want to learn something along the way…I just wanted to start a quilt and finish it in a timely manner.  No fuss no bother.  Pth.  The Quilting Universe had other plans, evidently.

As it turned out, it took me a while to admit out loud that I had two choices – Either cut a new backing piece (which sounded wasteful and I don’t do wasteful very well, especially when it comes to fabric) or veer to the more time consuming remedy – piece it with scraps.  The cool thing is that my Sugar Stars Quilt is made up of 168 Easy Corner Triangle units like this:

Which, after sewing a white square in the corner on the diagonal and accurately cutting off the scrap with a rotary cutter and ruler, leaving an exact 1/4″ seam allowance – left me with a whole lot of these:

which I sewed together…

to make these…

which then could become 3″ pinwheels like these:

So as much as I hated how long it took me to rectify my error, I love the back of my Sugar Stars quilt so much more than if I’d cut the backing piece the right size in the first place.

In a nutshell, the fabric is from the Roots and Wings Collection by Deena Rutter for Riley Blake.  It wasn’t supposed to be flannel. I ordered the wrong fabric.  So, even though a fair bit of it did sell at the shop, it was the only flannel we had at the shop and I didn’t want people to get confused as I had been, accidentally buying something they didn’t mean to buy.  So, I’ve used it for the backings of the last two quilts I’ve made. It’s quite soft and has coincidentally coordinated perfectly!

Anyway – one more quilt down, and more quilting lessons learned.  The moral of this story: If you know you’re going to have a whole bunch of scraps that will be about the same size and shape – cut them accurately with a rotary cutter, instead of just lopping them off with scissors at ‘about’ 1/4″.  You might thank yourself later that all your scraps are exactly the same size. I sure did! Happy Sewing, friends 🙂

Oh – Quilt kit. Yes. Here:

Sugar Stars Quilt Kit with Hazel by Cluck Cluck Sew