I’m making another Haptic Lab constellation quilt! I absolutely adore Haptic Lab’s work - this isn’t sponsored, but if you haven’t heard of them I’d definitely recommend a peruse through their online shop! I finished my first one - the large sized ‘southern stars’ design in 2019, and as soon as it was done I knew I wanted to make a northern hemisphere one to complete the set. It’s only taken us four years to get here!
The quilt isn’t finished - in fact, I’ve only just started the actual embroidery - but the setup for this one was pretty intense so we’re here today in case you find some of these hoops I jumped through helpful!
The Pattern
When I made my first constellation quilt, I ordered the printed version of the pattern which is super straightforward - it’s printed on a nonwoven fabric that is easy to tear out from under the stitches as they’re completed, and the setup is super easy - you simply lay the pattern over the top of your quilt, safety pin through all the layers, and you’re off to the races. It’s a perfect system - by far the easiest way to go, except it can be a bit expensive if you live outside of the US- and honestly, international shipping is still recovering from Covid - I have a few other things lost in the post at the moment so I’m not trusting the system! Instead, I decided to get the PDF.
The easiest way to work with the PDF - what Haptic Lab recommends - is to print it onto “Sulky Sticky Fabri-Solvy” - which is basically a sheet of water-soluble stabiliser that has a sticky back, and can go through a home printer. This, again, is amazing if you live in a country where Sulky distributes! I do not. The least expensive option I could find for the sheets in New Zealand was $3.25 per sheet, and at a total of 80 pages, the cost of the pattern alone would have been $260 - not to mention that my printer doesn’t currently have any ink so I’d have needed cartridges too. (I’ve just looked that up and the going rate is $72.47, apparently)
All of this is to say - there are a great many easier routes to get your pattern sorted than the method I chose. I made things quite a bit more complicated in order to avoid international shipping and to save $330 and change, but please understand that what I’m about to tell you took several evenings of work to complete and I don’t necessarily recommend it unless the above two options are out for you, like they were for me. It also only works if you have a Cricut or a Silhouette machine that can draw on A4 sheets.
I figured I could use tearaway embroidery stabiliser - which I’ve been buying in bulk for machine embroidery - but I wouldn’t be able to send it through my printer, even if I did have ink. Instead, I decided to use my Cricut Maker to draw each page on the stabiliser using a pen. Here’s how that went:
First - I used an online file format conversion tool to turn my PDF into a folder full of SVGs. This was super quick - a couple button clicks and a few minutes of waiting for the conversion. Next, I had to upload the SVGs into Cricut Design Space so that I could send them to the Cricut for drawing. This, unfortunately, happens one. page. at. a. time. There’s no way to batch.
Click upload, click browse, select file, select file type, remove background, select ‘cut’, name file, place file in folder if needed, hit save… repeat. 79 more times. Once they’re imported, you select each one individually to drop into your canvas. I ended up doing this in sets of ten because it seemed more manageable - I dropped ten pages into my canvas, set them all to ‘draw’, and then stacked them all on top of each other on the canvas but set each one to a different pen colour.
The Cricut will automatically stop between colours (so you can change the pen colour) which means you have a chance to go in and swap out one piece of stabiliser for the next one. There’s one additional caveat here - the files lose their sizing when they’re converted to SVGs, so you have to be extra-super-careful to get everything back to the right size again!
Now we’re on to drawing. Like machine embroidery, you can hit the go button on the machine and then sort of exist within earshot while it does its thing. You want to be available if something goes horribly wrong, but you don’t need to give it your full attention as it draws. That’s good, because this took *a while*. The pattern has dotted alignment lines around the border of each page, and a dotted line takes the machine a remarkably long time to draw. Each sheet took around 10 minutes to draw, which again, doesn’t sound so bad until you consider that there were eighty of them. This bit took several evenings where I was, of course, able to work on other projects, but I was interrupted every ten minutes to feed the Cricut a new piece of stabiliser to draw on. You know I love fiddly tasks, but this really was not my favourite way to spend an evening.
After each set of ten was drawn, I started stitching them together using my bernette 79’s 5mm basting stitch.. In a very early version of the plan, I was going to use spray-adhesive to stick each sheet individually to my fabric, but I came around to the idea of stitching them together because I didn’t want to risk staining my fabric or gumming up any stitches. I stitched them into strips, and then stitched the strips together until I had one big piece. Then, I was essentially back to the place where I started with the Northern Hemisphere quilt. I laid out my batting and fabric (I’ll come back to that in a minute!) and pinned the pattern through all the layers using bent safety pins.
As with my first quilt, I’m planning to stitch all but the guide lines through just the upper layer and the batting - I’ll add the backing to the quilt later on so that it has a nice clean finish on the back. That, I suspect, is a task that is still a few months away!
Additionally - I ran out of stabiliser after 50 out of the 80 pages. I felt comfortable starting anyways because I could still start in the middle and work my way towards the edges, but more stabiliser is on the way so I’ll make the last three rows when it arrives.
The Fabric
This was another area where I managed to get away quite easily with my first quilt, only to struggle in round two. My first quilt’s top fabric was actually leftover from a different project - I ended up bringing it back from the states, so it had been in the stash for years. I don’t remember where I bought it. The backing for that quilt came from a quilt shop here in New Zealand, and unfortunately the no longer stock that range. I was starting all over again, looking for a wide, 100% cotton fabric with a fine weave. The standard quilting cotton from Spotlight has a much coarser weave (you can tell in comparison to my first quilt below) and I knew I was going to need something better than that to avoid having little bits of my wool batting poking between the threads!
In the end, I didn’t find a suitable quality of fabric to use for my quilt in a fabric store in New Zealand. I’m sure some exists, but I ended up with a better idea. I bought a flat sheet. It was on sale, even, and I only needed a full sized sheet to fit the quilt. It was about $65. It’s a higher quality sheet and it has a high thread count with a lovely subtle sheen, and I couldn’t be happier with the find!
As with the first quilt, it took three runs through dye baths to get the right shade of dark navy blue. A lot of my dyes are from Uni, when I took my fibers course and learned about the best dyes for different types of fabrics…. that was 2013ish, so they’re a bit old! A few of the blues have lost their potency, so I didn’t keep specific track of the recipes used. I used a low-immersion method - as little water as possible for the fabric to sort of move around in - so that the dye would be fairly even but a little mottled, like clouds in the middle of the night. The rest was soda ash, table salt, and a combination of fiber reactive dyes including old Midnight Blue, Electric Blue plus newer Navy Blue, Sapphire Blue, and Jet Black from Dharma Trading Company. Jet Black is really handy for toning down the brightness of the dye a bit - I used one teaspoon in each of the last two dye baths. I also ran out of Navy after the first dye bath, so I ordered in a Jacquard “Dark Navy” from a local art supply store to use in the third. Jacquard fiber reactive dyes are more than twice the price of Dharma’s and in my opinion, Dharma’s product is excellent. I just again, didn’t want to risk international shipping. I will, however, be stocking up on my next trip home.
I’ll be buying another of the same flat sheet when it comes time to add the backing. As with my first, I’ll ice-dye the backing so that it resembles a nebula, but there’s no point doing that until closer to when I’m ready to use it - especially since I need more dye!
Between the dye differences and the different fabric, these two quilts are going to end up more as sisters than twins, but I’m happy with that! I suppose it’s part of the handmade appeal - not to mention the four year age gap! I’ll enjoy switching between using both of them, and perhaps one day when we move into a house with a guest bedroom I’ll be able to use one of them there.
The Process
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be actually stitching this project, finally. Setup took so much longer than I anticipated (although I think my stabiliser cost a whopping total of $35! I could spend what I saved on materials for a whole third quilt!) and I’m happy to finally be at the point where it’s a relaxing evening project rather than a case of troubleshooting file formats, figuring out an upload process, and triple-checking sizing. If you’re considering a constellation quilt - or, really, any other kind of large scale embroidery where you think you might like to stitch through a stabiliser layer - I hope this helped you a little bit, either in terms of figuring out the process or in deciding whether or not this is the best method for you.
I’ll be sharing this quilt’s progress on social media (probably mostly instagram) so if you’d like to watch it come together, come say hi! Either way, I’ll share another post here when it’s all finished!