I saw an article in the local newspaper about photographs taken by the Hubble telescope. The story included a couple samples of the photographs. I clipped them out of the paper, thinking they would make an awesome quilt someday.
I finally got around to designing a quilt from the smaller photograph. I placed a small piece of tracing paper over the clipping (1″ x 3.75″ in size) and drew converging lines around the major highlights of the picture. From this minuscule scrap of tracing paper, I drew the full design on graph paper to commence drafting a full scale model to draft my pattern pieces. As you can image, this is a time-consuming process and needs to be very accurate for the quilt to align properly and lie flat when completed.
One of the biggest challenges with this design was finding the appropriate fabrics in the shifting colors. Surprisingly enough, the white areas turned out to be the most difficult to find. I made a list of all the pattern pieces grouped by the colors to be used in that area of the quilt to assist me in choosing fabrics.
Most of this quilt was machine pieced then hand quilted with colored Sulky threads. After quilting and stretching the finished piece on a wooden frame, I placed various size crystals scattered throughout the design which reflect light and add another dimension to the piece as sunlight moves pass the quilt hanging on the wall.
This quilt measures 70.5″ w x 26″ h.
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