Friday 31 August 2012

Simplex star construction
Fabric piles for simplex xtars
It's a bit frustrating but having got to the binding stage with the bluework I have an idee fixe I must bind it in white so need to delay before I can lay my hands on a match.Which having said I'm sure I ordered some Kona white recently so must check.

Border choice

Simplex stars
Today I selected the inner border for the batik stars. I auditioned red, dark purple, aqua etc before settling on this aqua with gold and other muted colours which I hope relate to the centre of the quilt. Now I am making simplex (friendship) stars for the border as one of the swap conditions was "no simplex stars please". The ones I have done so far are all aligned the same way which makes a nice secondary pattern - they look like can can dancers side by side but I shall do some which revolve the other way and either intersperse them or use on different sides.
I've selected fabrics to go with the star blocks and arranged in four piles: purply, orange, pink and bluey. Instead of HST's for the simplex stars I've used a single piece of fabric for the black trapezoids and used a special ruler to cut them. These come out too long so I've trimmed after piecing and cut them shorter on the next go round. This method involves partial piecing arund the central square so not so simplex after all.