Bowmansville Star meets Hurdle Mills

My Spoonflower challenge quilt

Earlier this year, the Triangle Modern Quilt Guild teamed up with our super spunky hosts at Spoonflower to create a charity quilt challenge. The challenge came in two parts: first a contest to select the fabric palette, then making and submitting the quilts. The quilts will be donated to children in foster care in our area.

The winning fabric palette was composed by quilter Sarah Lowry, who blogs at Stitching and Bacon. It combined a range of pale and dark blue prints with coral and citron accents.

Sarah Lowry's fabric palette

Each of these fantastic prints are designed by Spoonflower customers for Spoonflower customers. They are, clockwise from upper left, 

• Entangled Navy by heatherdutton
• Spotscoral by caseydsibley
• "map" of our sky, border by mariao (designed "from a real sky map")
• mudcloth in citron by domesticate
• plus in sky blue by candykirbydesigns
• chevron ♥ navy blue by misstiina

Hettie Weaver's Bowmansville Star quilt, ca. 1880, featured in Quiltmania

For part II of the challenge, guild members received a bundle of six fat eighths (an eighth of a yard of fabric cut 9" x 21"), one for each print. We were allowed to incorporate three solids in our quilt design. 

I was inspired by a photo in the January - February 2015 issue of Quiltmania , which reported on the 20th European Patchwork Meeting. One of the historical quilts exhibited at the meeting was Hettie Weaver's Bowmansville Star, dating from ca. 1880 and measuring about 82" square. I grew up about 90 miles from Bowmansville, PA, and, though I'm Catholic myself, attended Mennonite youth fellowship at Bethel Mennonite Church in Gettysburg, PA with my best friend when I was a youngster. I felt a kinship with Ms. Weaver. Spending time adapting her beautiful quilt allowed me to revisit places in my memory and heart and reflect on the simplicity and beauty of the Mennonite tradition.

Ms. Weaver's quilt used a lot of yellow and orange, so I chose those for two of my solids. I then needed a darker color. I had no black or navy blue on hand, so for good or ill, I chose purple (I had a lot of it). With my 6 prints and three solids in hand, I mapped out Ms. Weaver's design in an Excel spreadsheet. I modified the design to accomodate the limited quantities of Spoonflower fabrics I had to work with and the limited value contrasts I could achieve with the solids. Similarly, to get the most mileage out of the Spoonflower prints, I decided to work with 1.5" squares, turning my Bowmansville star into a postage stamp quilt composed of eighteen-hundred and forty-nine (1849!) 1" finished squares and measuring a little over one fourth the size of Ms. Weaver's original quilt. I seem to have taken the "challenge" part very seriously.

Excel spreadsheet design

Laying out the squares was like putting together a puzzle. The piecing was not especially difficult, but required many hours. For the quilt back, I needed something simpler and quicker. I used the same color scheme in a scrappy improvisational brick pattern. After I finished quilting, squaring the quilt gave me just enough trimmed backing fabric to make a happy pieced binding.

Back of my Spoonflower challenge quilt

For the quilting, I echoed the around-the-world and sawtooth-star design elements. High loft batting added a touch of puff to the channels:

As you can see, the finished quilt is really, um, bright. But it is a star, after all. I pray that it brings light, good cheer, and a little silliness into the life of a child. And I hope it conveys the message: you are greatly loved.