Shine Bright: an Island Batik quilt finish

I was beginning to think this poor project was slightly cursed!

The advice on this beautiful little quilt reads “Shine Bright”. There were times, however I felt like it should have read more along the lines of “Burn, Sucker!”. haha In short; the quilt is finished and it is good. Actually, it’s really lovely. It is exactly what I wanted and needed. The journey, however, was blessed with a few unwanted twists and turns. The long version of the story goes as follows……

It seemed every time I settled into this project, something random happened to stop me getting it done!

• The power went out on Tuesday.
• I ran out of bobbin thread on Wednesday….. as in, none left on the spool, not just an empty bobbin. I hadn’t really worried that the amount of thread I had remaining was probably not enough…. it is a common colour of a common thread. But….. getting more turned out to be non-trivial. My local store had every colour in stock except one…. Yes, of course, that one.
• Eventually got some more thread, finished the quilt. Then as I was adding a hanging sleeve…. I discovered a stain. Actually, not a stain. A whole bunch of stains over an entire corner including the pale binding. Like the cat sneezed his food all over it, or someone splattered it with soup! I still have no idea what the stain was or how it got there, but thankfully it washed out. Took a whole day to dry though before I could continue to add the sleeve.
• Just to slow me down one last time, I had “help” getting photos.

Thankfully I now have it up on the wall where presumably no more strange events can befall it!

Shine Bright: the details

Shine Bright is my Island Batik ambassador project for August. It is made from the batik Blueberry Patch fabric collection, coming to your local quilt stores very soon. Disclaimer: these fabrics were given to me by Island Batik to feature on their behalf. It wasn’t hard to twist my arm…. they are glorious!

Here is the stack of fabric I received.

All blues, with a range of garden themed prints and filler designs.

My instructions were to make a project featuring a star block. I chose this wonky star block (tutorial here).

You can read about the rest of the quilt top construction here, and the appliqué/quilting update here.

The fused appliqué lettering and eventually the binding were both done with an Island Batik neutral fabric called Almond Dots.

The quilt top was pieced with Rasant thread, the appliqué was done with Madeira rayon on top and DecoBob polyester underneath. The batting is a bamboo/cotton blend scrap I had left over from another project. The quilting was done with Rasant in the bobbin and a variegated Wonderfil Tutti cotton on top.

I did free-motion swirls to quilt Shine Bright.

Shine Bright: the purpose

And here we get closest to a reason for why Shine Bright resisted being finished. Maybe. Perhaps it’s a simple case of “pride comes before a fall!”. I’ll admit I designed this quilt with a single purpose in mind. To hold and display all my competitive ribbons and pins where I can see them and enjoy them. 😀 Maybe the cosmos thinks that this was a bad motive. I like to think that now I derive a healthy pleasure from my achievements after several decades of simultaneously not feeling good enough and embarrassed at any success. I have quite a nice collection of ribbons and rosettes from the last couple of years and I want to get them on display and out of reach of the cat.

Maybe I should have learned from the first time….

This is actually not the first time I have attempted this goal! Several years ago I tried to make myself a small ribbon display quilt. I only had a few Royal Adelaide Show ribbons at the time and I made a Dream Big mini quilt designed by Geta at Geta’s Quilting Studio. I put it on the wall with 3M Velcro….. it should have been a success, but the cat saw the dangling ribbons as a challenge.

Turns out, Mr Mew can reach to my shoulder height with his paw in a vertical jump, from a stationary start off the floor. If I hold my arm out horizontally from my shoulder and wiggle my fingers against a wall he loves to bounce up and ever so gently touch them. From the floor to my fingers is about 57″. I’m sure he could go to 60″ without much effort. Anyway, after a couple of weeks of Dream Big being up, he ripped it down. The 3M velcro held the quilt and the ribbons, but not the cat.

I should have known a ribbon-baited quilt velcroed to the wall wouldn’t last long. Silly me.

Shine Bright: the distractions

Before I hung Shine Bright, I went to take a few photos of it in a different context. Wouldn’t it make a terrific bed runner? Here it is on my queen size bed.

I had a lot of trouble getting this photo, risking life and limb for you. I set up the shot and went for my camera, only to be greeted with this on my return…..

It is not your imagination. Cats are truly the centre of everything!

I asked Mr Mew very nicely to move. He said….

I moved him the minimum distance myself. He said that I will pay for that soon.

While I am waiting to have said revenge wreaked upon me, I am thinking of new fun things to do with this bed runner idea. I could switch out the “Shine Bright” text and the middle star and replace them with two names and an ampersand. Something like this:

Wouldn’t that make a great wedding gift?

Or I could add the text “Seasons Greetings” instead, and it would suddenly be a Christmas table runner for a large table, such as a trestle.

Anyway, enough distractions, back to the wall mounting…..

This time I have mounted my ribbon quilt on three serious hooks. Just below the ceiling, above the door to the formal lounge that I have gradually commandeered as my sewing room.

Here it is all laden with my prizes and quilting-related collectable paraphernalia.

There are two long ribbons missing…. the two that were on the Dream Big mini quilt. Apparently I removed them from the quilt after the cat downed them and put them somewhere safe…. I’ll add them when they show up.

I have also added Island Batik pins for my two years as an ambassador. I have several other trinkets from commemorative events in my local quilting community, including 175 years of the Royal Adelaide Show and 30 years of the South Australian Quilters’ Guild.

Soon I will have more ribbons and rosettes to put up there… 🙂 The 2019 Royal Adelaide Show opened on Friday just gone. I entered 4 items into the Handicrafts section – three quilts and the Chameleon’s self-portrait. The Chameleon came second in his category of original design embroidery. And I have three rosettes from my quilts: a first, a third and a fourth. I’ll tell you more about that when I’ve had a chance to attend the Show next week. 😀

In the meantime, you can see someone is plotting aforesaid revenge. You will notice in the previous photo that the white rosette on the left has its ribbon tucked up shorter than the same rosettes on the right. There is a reason for that……

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I could be wrong, but I am hoping he’ll decide that that leap is not for him, purely because there is nowhere safe for him to land. He is naughty but he is not stupid.

I hope!

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