The Bali Wedding Star Quilt
Oh yes. The Magnum Opus.
Several years ago (maybe ten?) my cousin Mary got engaged (yay!) but wasn’t going to get married until after she finished school. At the time, she was just starting her Master’s program and was planning on getting her Doctorate. For me, this was super exciting!! My family has this crazy tendency to date for a super long time, then get engaged and get married a few months later making deadlines for Wedding Quilts really hard to meet. At Last!! I had a few YEARS to make this quilt! I had all the time in the world to do it! What on earth could I do with all this time? How about the beautiful Bali Wedding Star Quilt designed by Judy Niemeyer! I had drooled over this pattern for years but had never actually thought I had the time to do it. Now I did! I set off to working on it, and got pretty far into the design. That’s where life got in the way.
Unfortunately, a LOT of the pattern work is making the wedding ring pieces and all of the cutting. I had gotten all of this done, but hadn’t gotten many pieces together. Fast forward to Mary’s Wedding Shower: She received one corner of the quilt and pictures of the entire quilt laid out, but not pieced. She didn’t mind. She loved it. I had laid out the entire quilt on a king size sheet and rolled it up. And then life got in the way again…
Her Wedding came and went. I got engaged. I got married. Then she was ready to have a baby and Baby Showers were mentioned. I could not let her Wedding Quilt sit there unfinished while she was opening presents at her Baby Shower….nope. Not going to happen.
It took all the efforts in the land because there were now three quilts being made/finished at the same time (Please see this blog here about The Adventurer I and II).
This was completely unplanned, by the way, but I decided to gift this quilt to her at the Baby Shower. I told her sister about it to make sure she didn’t mind, and that was fine. I brought my two quilts, both boxed separately and sat down at my table to enjoy the Shower. Somehow, her sister grabbed this Quilt as her first gift. How cool was that? Before we get started on baby presents, let’s get her wedding presents out the way. lol.
To make this even better, the presents were opened and somehow, there we were…down to the last gift of the Shower. It was the other box I brought….the baby quilt! I still joke that at least she got her Wedding Quilt at her 1st Baby’s Shower. It could have been her kid’s Graduation!!
Fun Fact: This quilt top is made up of exactly 2,345 pieces of fabric. Yes, I’m crazy and calculated and tallied that up….
Here’s the details on The Bali Wedding Star Quilt
Title: The Bali Wedding Star Quilt
Pattern: Bali Wedding Star by Judy Neimeyer
Size: Queen, finished ~81″ x 90″
Fabric: A “schload” of Bali Pops by Hoffman fabrics, the “black” fabric is a Kona Cotton Solid by Robert Kaufman called “Pepper,” and the background fabric is Simply Imagine by Red Rooster Fabrics
Piecing: Machine stitched on Betsy, the Bernina 560, with 100% Cotton thread by Valdani, in Cream
Cutting: by hand with rotary cutter, paper foundation pieces cut with my trusty paper rotary cutter
Quilting: Tied with Takhi Cotton Classic, 100% cotton yarn purchased at Cornwall Yarn Shop
Backing: ummmm….I forget, but I know I ordered it from FabricShack in Waynesville, Ohio
Label: Hand Embroidered by Anne Lemin of Quilted Lovelies, hand stitched by Danika to attach to quilt
Batting: Warm and White, by The Warm Company
Finished Date: March 2018
Total Hours: made before I tracked my specific hours….but if I had to guess, it would be 200+ hours