The Journey of a Fractured Star was pieced and designed by someone who wants to remain anonymous, but we had the pleasure of talking with her on the phone. This is what she shared with us:

“I had made a star-patterned quilt [based on a pattern by Judy Martin] and it was very well received … I didn’t manage to keep it for long [it was sold]. Initially, my idea was to do this second quilt with the scraps of the first, and I thought everything had been planned out and I’d have enough fabric. But when I was three-quarters of the way through piecing it together, I realized [I] did not have enough fabric! And there was not a single bit of matching fabric I could find anywhere; I had to revert to using a different fabric with the same tones.”

She then ran into another problem: the seamlines did not line up symmetrically in the centre of the quilt.

“I had it laid out on my kitchen table, [and then] on my dining room floor; I had calculators out, I was doing the math, trying to figure out how to make the centre line up. When you look at it closely, there are a couple glitches in it where the seamlines of the wave either … [have] a sharper turn, or [are] not symmetrical with the one beside it.”

After much struggle and frustration and even contemplating throwing the whole thing out, a different perspective began to take shape, piece by piece.

“I spend a lot of time with people who are going through a difficult time in their life. Sometimes, when we are in the darkest times, everything is so fractured and the bits and pieces are lying around—everything is such a tragedy. If you look at this star and think this was just a fractured set of pieces and strips pulled apart, remnant fabric, and, I have to admit, [at one point] it was in the garbage can—I thought it was a hopeless case. But I’ve never thrown out an unfinished work before. So, I took another look at it and laid it out and I knew it couldn’t be that bad.

“In the end, when I was ready to not only accept that it wasn’t perfect, when I was ready to embrace the fact that I was just going to make what I can out of it, and we’re going to create it to be beautiful, though it’s not the way a pattern would ever be written, it took on a deeper meaning and it’s much more gratifying the way it came together.

“My hope is that this quilt will inspire someone through a difficult time, thinking ‘maybe God is working within my life right now when it looks like the pieces are laying around, I’ve messed things up so bad, I don’t know what my future holds.’ And to remember that the Master Designer sometimes has a vision we can’t imagine. It might be years later when we look back and we see the work He has done in our lives which has allowed [our lives] to mature and grow into something beautiful.”