A Journey to the Beginning

I posted about this project back in July of 2016  You can read about it here.  

Each section of this uses 63 diamonds and there are 6 sections.  You can see a piece of the black and white that was my inspiration and I was planning on having this as a project to keep me busy while my guy recovered from his shoulder surgery July 2016.  What I didn't plan on was having surgery to put my left wrist back together after taking a tumble 2 weeks after his surgery.

I pondered how to make each section and as you can see, I wanted the red to radiate from the center star.  The vintage piece was quite muddy in it's value placement, and I tried to "brighten" up the lights a bit, but I didn't want it to look too "perfect"

So this has been a long time coming, I started the process July 2016 and here we are, August 2017 and I now have the beginning of a medallion quilt.  It's a bit hard to tell, but the background is a navy blue with a little design on it.  I've removed all the paper with the exception of the outside edge, pressed and Best Pressed to get it as flat as possible, and have heavily basted it down.  I will hand applique the edge and keep the basting in until the whole piece is finished.  I don't want the weight of the paper piecing to sag from the background while I continue to add rounds of blocks to this center.

And since I had stacks of diamond papers left over, I started making stars.  100 of them.

Now I'm adding the background and will stitch this together in sections.  Right now I'm still working on backgrounds. 

I love having these take along projects in the mix of things.  It keeps my hands busy when watching tv, waiting on an appointment, or taking a break from the longarm.  I'm volunteering at the NW Washington Fair tonight, so this box will come along with me.  Fair pictures coming next week.

Enjoy the weekend, if you are in the path of the eclipse, embrace the crazy that will be coming to a town near you!  And as always,

Keep stitching,
Sharon