Stars blanket

This blanket! Oh, this blanket gave me so much trouble, but I do love it despite harboring varying degrees of ill-will towards the process of making it.

One of my favorite songs (almost of all time) is "Stars" from the musical Les Miserables, especially the verses: "Stars / In your multitude / Scarce to be counted / Filling the darkness / With order and light/ You are the sentinels / Silent and sure/ Keeping watch in the night / You know your place in the sky / You hold your course and your aim / And each in your seasons returns and returns / And is always the same." I find it so reassuring. Stars are constant, sailors used them to navigate, that's how reliable they are. (This blog seems to be a whole slew of metaphors that I like rose, toast, stars: check.)

When I saw this fabric at Jones and Vandermeer, I felt compelled to have some to make a blanket. I ended up purchasing a meter (about a yard) thinking that I would create a whole-cloth quilt requiring zero cutting (because you can't just cut into Liberty fabric).

I bought a yard of minky for the backing in light gray and added a layer of batting to fill it up a bit. The Liberty is so very light and airy it needed a bit of weight.  

Being very much aware of how much I love this fabric based on my love for the song I was very cautious and spent a lot of time looking at the fabric with no desire to really get started. Perhaps the apprehension is what led to all the trouble. I began by pinning all the layers together in a quilt sandwich. Nerves, I'll blame the nerves, led to piecing the sandwich together wrong, a feature that wasn't noticed until all the layers had been sewn together. Out came the seam ripper! Ripping on Liberty is gutting. Absolutely heart-wrenching. I almost quit right then and there and put away my sewing machine for good. But it wasn't the machine's fault:

And the whole process began again. A task that I had imagined taking only a few hours ended up taking most of the day, but I did finish and do love how it turned out and think that it pays homage to my love of "Stars" very well.