Dashing Stars Beginners Quilt

A cover for my ironing board and a full design wall

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Are you prone to procrastination? It is my middle name! Generally fueled by fear of failure, I often procrastinate beyond the deadline to get the thing done. So it is with a ridiculous amount of pride that I now declare several years of procrastination over and my table-top ironing board’s new cover ready to use!

Ironing Board cover in situ by Allison Reid
The new cover – not too shabby even if I do say so myself! 🙂

I reckon the ironing board must be nine years old – bought during my first ever trip to IKEA when our daughter started University. The original cover has been stained with unsightly brown scorch marks for many of those years. Even concern the marks might discolour some of my fabrics has not been enough incentive for me to overcome the fear I might not succeed in making a replacement!

I don’t know quite what got me to the point of overcoming the fear and the resulting procrastination but there was a moment earlier this week when I decided ‘enough was enough’.

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Choosing and stitching a walking foot quilting design

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At last Saturday’s Beginners Course we reached the quilting stage of constructing our quilts. I demonstrated a few ideas for quilting using a walking foot eg. in-the-ditch, echoing, wavy lines… I’d had a think about how to quilt my version of the Dashing Stars quilt. In-the-ditch would work but I favoured stitching a quilting design over the patchwork to add ‘movement’, helping to take the eye roaming around the patchwork design. I considered a diagonal hatch across the quilt and considered curves, maybe echoing arcs or a swirl. Eventually I came up with stitching a large zig-zag down the centre of the quilt and then echoing the shape to either side.

Dashing Stars quilting diagram by Allison Reid
Quilting diagram. The thick black line represents the first zig-zag, the thinner green lines the lines of echo stitching and the pink dotted lines the chalk lines used to mark where the next quilting line should pivot.

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