So I left you all when I thought I had the answers to the Scrappy-Star-conundrum with the Japanese fabrics.  Nope.  Discouraged, I headed to a quilt shop, where  guess what–out of all of the fabrics we tried, we liked the stars on some red Quilters Linen fabric.

Like I said, it seemed like the answer. Here’s some pictures of the process I went through.  I was happy with the red, as it acted like a solid, but still wanted to beef up the quilt with pattern and texture, a la Material Obsession quilt shop in Australia, as I love looking at their quilts.

Now I’m trying to add in those fabrics.  As you can see–it’s not working.  Again.  This is when I wrote the blog post on Struggle, appreciating Robert Penhall’s quote particularly.

Auditioning, Take Two.  I realize that photographs flatten out what’s going on, but as you can see, what was going on had problems.  I came home right after school, took an Internet Sabbath, and worked steadily on sewing together the center section.  When my husband came home last night, he kissed me hello and asked me how my day was.

“I hate my quilt,” I said.

After dinner, we went up together to look at the disaster quilt.  We talked, and I felt like a balloon deflating.  The view evolved as we tried different things, talking and talking, but really the quilt just has so much going on.  Like I’ve said before, I was trying to take Cinderella to the Prince’s Ball, and she really just want to go out for a burger and fries.  We folded back the end stars, took down some of the wild fabrics, paring it down.  I felt as if the quilt had beat me, as if I had caved.  But burgers-and-fries it was going to be, no matter where I wanted to go.

Cutting off of the side star.  I unpicked the center so I could save two of the star points for another project (like I ever want to tangle with this one again!).  I finished sewing the center all together, smoothed it up on the wall, and went to bed. In the morning, the pared-down quilt, white on the wall, greeted me and I chose the tomatoes on yellow for the inner border and auditioned the outer borders:

I guess I don’t feel defeated anymore, just happy it’s to this point.  I wanted that sophisticated, interesting quilt, really I did.  But what I have instead is a bold graphic set of stars, demanding un-adornment, insisting that the rest of the crowd pipe down so they can shine.

There’s a great children’s book titled “Babe, The Gallant Pig,” which was made into a movie.  At the very end, the farmer looks down at Babe, his pig, and says “That’ll do Pig.  That’ll do.”

That’ll do, Scrappy Stars.  That’ll do.