New Project In My Pipeline: Seven Sisters or Seven Stars Quilt for Hand Piecing

Inspiration: Seven Sisters Quilt Top by Martha Dellasega Gray (2014)

 

Isn't that Seven Sisters quilt top glorious?!  It was completed in 2014 by Martha Dellasega Gray and you can read all about it on her Q is for Quilter blog here.  I can't help myself, I have to make one, too (or at least START one!).  But before we start talking about the new project, I should do a quick recap of all my preexisting sewing projects for the sake of accountability:

• My StyleArc Nova Midi Dress: Fabric purchased, nothing cut out yet, found my Swedish Tracing Paper but still need to clear off my cutting table before tracing off the pattern pieces and making a start.  Still weighing pros and cons of sizing/pattern alteration options and bodice construction methods, and need a good stretch of uninterrupted time to work on that (I've had mostly fits and snatches of time here and there for sewing lately).
• My Deco Quilt: Remaining blocks for the entire quilt have been all cut out and ready to sew since before the move, but I haven't touched this one in over two months.  I am finding that I really miss having a big design wall where I can arrange/display a work in progress.  Seeing the quilt take shape on my design wall while working on the blocks was a major motivator in my previous studio, whereas completed blocks packed away in the closet are literally out of sight and out of mind.  There is one large wall in the central hallway of our new home that would work for a design wall, just to the left of our shared office and directly across from my little sewing room...  I have suggested a design wall in this location to my husband several times but the idea has not been well received thus far.  😞.  

My Deco Quilt In Progress, On My Old Design Wall, Boo Hoo...

• My Tilda Scrappy Celebration Quilt: Fabrics have been selected for my next set of six blocks and I printed out my card stock templates, as the block in the original quilt was one of those traditional Y-seam blocks that has been "simplified" and I think the block is more attractive with the chisel-shaped patches and the Y-seam construction.  I'm actually itching to stitch these but have been waiting to cut the patches until I make progress on my dress, like these blocks are a reward.  Silly!  As with Deco, I don't see this quilt progressing much without a design wall to help me visualize how the blocks I've made so far will look together.  I'm picking out fabric combinations as I go along.

My Initial Tilda Fabric Pull for Scrappy Celebration

• My FrankenWhiggish Rose Needle Turn Appliqué Quilt: I haven't touched this one since October of last year.  My "One Monthly Goal" for December was supposed to be prepping the remaining 48 rosebuds for these blocks, but we found out Bernie's job was moving us from North Carolina to Florida right after I set that goal and then packing and prepping the house for sale took priority over appliqué!  Thank goodness my project notes are all safely stored here on the Internet where I can pull them up with keyword searches, because I could not even remember how I made the other rosebuds after so much time had passed.

Broderie Perse Rosebuds Detail, FrankenWhiggish Rose Block

• Letter Home to Baby: This one started out as an exercise using some of my Pinterest Favorite Color Combinations pins to create a palette of solids for a baby quilt.  I created several different colorings of the same AQS Letter Home quilt in EQ8, reducing the block size to yield a 42" x 42" baby quilt, and one of those versions was finished as a baby gift in 2020.  I bought fabrics for another version, with no baby in mind, prewashed everything, and then forgot all about it until I rediscovered the fabric and pattern as I was packing to move.  There are no baby showers on my horizon so far as I know, but this would be a fun one for custom quilting and might look nice on the wall in my new sewing room, so that might reappear sooner rather than later...

Planned Letter Home 42 x 42 Quilt in Kona Solids

• Star Upon Stars Quilt: This one is a reproduction of an antique quilt circa 1846.  Does this one even count as a work-in-progress?  All I've done is purchase Laundry Basket Quilts patterns, templates, and a boatload of fabric for this quilt and all of that happened in March of 2023.  Now that I've seen Wendy's breathtaking version of this quilt 😍 I'm even more in love with the pattern, but this is another large quilt combining many fabrics and I really feel like I'm going to need to see how I'm balancing color and value from block to block as it's taking shape.  It needs a design wall, and it needs some serious concentration.  Definitely go check out Wendy's quilt.  I love that she reinterpreted the quilt in a bright, modern color palette incorporating Tula Pink prints, but used the same traditional hand piecing and hand quilting methods as the 19th century original.  Edyta's Star Upon Stars QAL tutorials demonstrate strip piecing the diamond star blocks by machine; I'll likely try machine stitching first and see how that goes.  Wendy has a fabulous YouTube video where she demonstrates hand piecing 8 pointed star blocks that would be helpful to anyone wishing to hand piece Star Upon Stars.  Anyway, this one is probably not getting started "for real" until Deco and Scrappy Celebration are finished -- and not until that big wall in my hallway gets upholstered in quilt batting!

Star Upon Stars Is Waiting For Me...

• Happy Days BOM, Down the Rabbit Hole BOM, and Simple Folk BOM Quilts, all designs by Sarah Fielke.  I signed up for all three of these BOM (Block of the Month) projects for 2022, but was trying to be disciplined about finishing my FrankenWhiggish Rose quilt before starting a new appliqué project.  I've paid for all 3 patterns and have "forever access" to the downloads and tutorial videos, but haven't started any of them yet.  They're not going anywhere.

Whew -- getting all of that off my chest felt like a religious confession!  In addition to the projects listed above, there are also a few unopened quilts, many AccuQuilt GO! dies waiting to be used, and many other books and patterns and lots and lots of fabric...  But writing this blog post was my Quilting Penance, and now I am absolved of those Unfinished Project Sins.  Which is great, because I just ordered a NEW quilt pattern and NEW acrylic templates for making it from Michelle Yeo and I'm planning to dive in as soon as these goodies show up in my mailbox.

Seven Stars or Seven Sisters: A New Hand Piecing Project for Rebecca

Yes, I've got lots of projects in the works already, but what I don't have is a 100% portable hand stitching project with little to no advance prep work that has to be done at home.  Everyone's health is stable now, but Life had me spending more time than usual in hospital rooms and doctor's offices over the past couple months and my idle fingers were itching for something stitch during all of that down time!  My dress, Deco Quilt, Scrappy Celebration quilt and Letter Home quilts are all machine stitching projects.  FrankenWhiggish Rose won't be ready for portable hand stitching again until I've made all of my tiny rosebuds and glue basted them to my blocks, and the Sarah Fielke appliqué projects will also require prep work at home before any of the blocks are ready for on-the-go stitching.  Star Upon Stars could potentially be hand stitched (like Wendy's) but I would still want to work on that one in my studio where I can access my entire stash for editing fabric combinations as I go along.  Enter the new project, Seven Sisters:

Seven Sisters Reproduction Pattern by Michelle Yeo available here

Although the Seven Sisters pattern (alternatively known as Seven Stars) dates back to the mid-19th century, my interest was piqued by this scrappy rainbow version of Seven Sisters made by Martha of Q is for Quilter:

Martha's Scrappy Rainbow Seven Sisters Blocks

Because Martha is an awesome quilt blogger, she linked to this fantastic tutorial for hand piecing the Seven Sisters quilt block, written by Cathi of Quilt Obsession.  Cathi's tutorial is so good, I won't even need pattern instructions!  She uses Inklingo to print her cutting and stitching lines directly onto her fabric for hand piecing, but that isn't an option for me because Inklingo requires an inkjet printer and ours is laser.  However, I ordered the companion acrylic template set from Michelle Yeo along with her Seven Sisters pattern and I think I'll like them better anyway as tracing around templates and scissor-cutting patches as needed is more portable than ironing freezer paper to fabric and printing the shapes onto your fabric with a computer.  Clear acrylic templates are also more useful for fussy cutting and working with small scraps of fabric, and they  have tiny holes drilled at the seam intersections just big enough to mark those crucial points with the tip of a mechanical pencil:

Michelle Yeo's Seven Sisters Acrylic Templates

So when I pack this project up for stitching on the go, all I need is:

1. Ziplock bag of fabric scraps for the seven stars
2. Fat quarter or fat eighth piece of background fabric
3. Set of four acrylic templates
4. small sandpaper board (to hold the fabric still while tracing around templates)
5. Bohin mechanical chalk pencil for dark fabrics
6. regular mechanical pencil for light fabrics
7. Karen Kay Buckley microserrated scissors
8. Spool of coordinating cotton thread, likely Aurifil 40 weight 2-ply (green spool)
9. hand sewing needles, probably sharps
10. Thread snips

None of my other hand stitching projects can just walk out the door like that!  So I'm excited and wishing that my pattern and templates were coming Amazon Prime instead of snail-mail post from Australia, which is literally the other side of the Earth from Florida in the United States!  Meanwhile, of course, I'm thinking about fabrics and looking to both historic examples and newer versions of Seven Sisters quilts for inspiration.  

Quilt historian Barbara Brackman tells us that the Civil War symbolism (seven stars representing the first seven states to secede from the Union) often attributed to the Seven Sisters/Seven Stars quilt block is likely apocryphal.  The first references to Seven Stars = Seven States Seceding don't appear until much later, in the 1930s.  You can read more about the history of the Seven Sisters/Seven Stars quilt pattern on Barbara's Civil War Quilts blog here.  Incidentally, the Seven Sisters quilt block is included in the Barbara's BlockBase+ standalone software from the Electric Quilt Company (affiliate link), so I could have used that software to instantly print card stock templates and start piecing my Seven Sisters blocks right away.  I prefer purchasing the acrylic templates this time for two reasons: durability of the templates, since I'll be tracing around each shape hundreds and hundreds of times and the edges of card stock templates are prone to wear.  I also prefer the transparency of the acrylic templates for this quilt, in case I want to do any fussy-cutting for special effects in some of my star units.

Antique Seven Sisters Quilt from Barbara Brackman's blog

In researching this quilt pattern I found that most quilters used their background fabric for the trapezoid patches framing each block of seven stars so the stars appear to float against the background, but in a few antique examples (above from Barbara Brackman's blog and below from the Quilt Index), the maker chose to use an accent color for those patchwork units, making the hexagonal shape of the blocks more apparent and, if setting them with equilateral triangles as in Michelle Yeo's pattern and in the antique quilt example below, it makes the larger star shapes pop out as a nice complement to the smaller stars.  I can think more about that while waiting for my pattern and my acrylic templates to arrive from Australia!

 c1910 Antique Seven Sisters from The Quilt Index

But you know what ELSE I could do while waiting for my new project supplies to arrive?  I could prep some tiny little rosebuds for my FrankenWhiggish Rose blocks!  

I'm linking up today's post to some of my favorite linky parties:

MONDAY

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs  

TUESDAY

To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt  

WEDNESDAY

Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter

THURSDAY

Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

FRIDAY

Peacock Party at Wendy’s Quilts and More

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty

 TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: TGIF Friday

SUNDAY

Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework

 

Slow Stitching Sunday at Kathy's Quilts