Making a quilt starts with color. In this quilt, I was helping solve marital differences of taste in a way that made both parties happy. Maria loves the color yellow and wanted a bright, sunshiny bedroom. Adam loves green and especially likes the dark avocado to olive green and wanted an earthy feel. At first, we all thought that this color combination would be just awful. I went with Maria to the fabric store where we found a piece of fabric with sunflowers all over it. It had the right shades of both the yellow and the green. We used this fabric as a starting point to pick the other fabrics. Maria knew she wanted a star quilt for a queen sized bed, which meant we had to find eleven coordinating fabrics for the star as well as a background fabric. There were not enough shades of yellow or green to step from light to dark without adding in a third color. Since both Maria and Adam were thinking of a nature inspired quilt, they settled on adding blue to represent the sky.The next step in making this quilt was to cut the fabric into strips. In these two pictures, you can start to get a general sence of how the colors will work together.
The strips are sewed together in six sets of six strips. Then the strips are cut a second time, diagonally in order to give it the diamond shape.
The strips are then sewn into a large diamond like the one above. It takes eight of these large diamonds to make the star pattern.
The large diamonds are are then sewn together. In this picture, the diamond blocks are laying on the background fabric because my rug is nearly the same color as the quilt.
Once all eight large diamonds together, the background fabric is cut and added to the star.
After the background comes the borders. You can see that this large quilt is starting to eat my living room.
One of the most challenging aspects of making a star quilt is lining up the points in the diamonds. It's hard to see with this resolution, but I was quite proud of my "perfect points."
To finish this quilt, I planned on tying it rather than machine quilting, so the next step was to pin the edges to the back and batting and sew around the perimeter. The quilt is then turned right-side-out and the hole that is used to turn is stitched shut. The blocks are tied through all three layers and the borders are sewn "in the ditch" to add stability.
This is the finished quilt on my too small full sized bed.
And this is the final stop for the quilt: Maria's and Adam's bed.(Lone Star approximately 108"x115" (generous queen) 2007)
