Pluto Star

I guess this is Cindy's quilt too. It hangs in her bedroom over her bed. It is a large wall hanging, not a bed quilt. She named it "Pluto Star" after the large shape in the center. I had named the outer stars - clockwise from upper left - marigold star, sun star, tapestry star, fireworks star, sunset star, earth star, violet star, blueberry star, diamond star, ocean star, forest star and salad star.

This quilt started out as a project in which I was going to make twelve large scale blocks, each of them a single wall hanging. I had the pieces cut out. The theme was analogous color schemes. Each star was one color plus the colors to the left and right on the color wheel - for example yellow, yellow green and yellow orange. The first star was the red-violet star, which I called earth star. It was the Hoffman challenge from quite a few years ago.

Well that project sat in pieces for years, until I got the idea to cut the pieces down to scale and make small stars to go on one large quilt. If you look closely you can see the color wheel theme is repeated in the outermost lights and darks of the center star. The individual blocks were hand pieced and quilted. The borders were machine quilted.

This is the only quilt I have that has won a ribbon in a show with judges. I don't enter that many, but I entered this one in a show in Lancaster, Massachusetts. I won a second place ribbon in the traditional wall hanging category, which is ironic because Penrose tiles are anything but traditional, having been discovered by the mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s. (The winner in that category happened to be a virtuoso tour de force of thirteen Sunbonnet Sues, arranged exactly the same way my Penrose blocks were arranged, each one playing a different musical instrument.)