Dark Side of the Moon.....2004-2006

I started this quilt in 2004 and didn't finish it until 2006.

I have always wanted to have a traditional 2-color Drunkard's Path quilt, but didn't think I could do the curved piecing. So when a local quilt shop taught a class, I took it. I love batiks and wanted to try using them. It wasn't as hard as I thought to make the blocks, but I still do not think I have the patience to do a traditional Drunkard's Path quilt that would be bed sized.After bringing my stack of partly finished blocks home from the class, I decided that I wanted to lay them out in a sort of "planet" effect and wanted a really dark circle to be a moon. I ended up using a dark flannel for all the dark circle arcs because it was darker looking than most of the cotton fabrics. I had no real "plan" at this point......as usual! I happened to watch a Simply Quilts show where they were paper piecing "rays" like in my sun block, so I immediately decided to add a sun! Well.....I hadn't done it before and it is a bit crooked, but I got the look I wanted.
My final lay-out suited what I wanted and I found a dark blue sky print with tiny stars all over it for the border. Taking pictures of this quilt is hard. It normally hangs in a hall with no room to stand and even moving it into a different room, I was struggling with a skylight overhead throwing weird lights on it.

I decided to hand quilt it....I wanted to do the entire quilt myself. For the most part I let the fabrics guide me in how I quilted it. I knew some things that I wanted to do....rays from the suns and in other yellow areas, constellations in the blue areas, quilting the circles into the border that continued the ones in the main part of the quilt, a beaded ringed planet, etc.

This "planet" has 6 little moons around it....3 show here.

My ringed planet......beaded rings and quilted rings both.

My comet....this turned out harder to do than I thought it would, and I ended up only doing one comet where I thought I would make several on the quilt! I have to starch the threads to try to keep them flowing backwards from the head of the comet. The back of the quilt in this area was a total mess of thread by the time I finished it!

.....so on the back of the quilt I appliqued some suns and planets to cover the worse stitching areas :-) Mike likes the back of the quilt better than the front. This was not suppose to be our solar system (not enough planets), but when they decided that Pluto was no longer a planet, I decided that I would like to get some fabric with a picture of Disney's Pluto and cut out a tiny Pluto planet and add it to the back. I haven't found the fabric yet, but will do this some day :-) I thought about adding a pair of eyes somewhere on the front, also........in case there is life on the planets on the dark side of the moon :-)

Two of the planets on the back became my label.

This project was another fun one for me....with all the embellishing and fun stuff, but it was also very tiring trying to do the hand quilting and get it done. I got bored before I finished and there are several areas with no quilting. Oh, well....who would notice? I did machine quilting to add some "rays" to the outer border....nothing fancy.