Starflower: Part I

A while back I decided it was absurd for me to have made all these pretty quilts but have only an ugly old  coverlet on our bed.  Seriously, it was wretched; we had a down comforter covered in a faded, holey, green flannel duvet cover that we inherited from my mom in the pre-quilting days after it got too threadbare for her bed.  It wasn't even the right size.  However, we have a king sized bed and I didn't want to make anything too complicated since it needed to be large and stand up to quite a bit of wear.

When my sister got a book on simple, one-basic-piece lone stars (Easy and Elegant Lone Stars by Shirley Stutz), I thought it would be perfect for a giant bed quilt.  My mom and I actually each made a king sized quilt from this book and my sister made a quilt from it as well.  I really do like the large 8 pointed star motif- for anyone keeping track, this is my third quilt to use it.  The key to getting great motion and visual interest with only one piece for each point is to pick a large repeating pattern.  I picked out my fabric of choice, this Kaffe Fassett print from his spring 2008 collection before I'd seen the book, and it's a little too regular to give good movement, but I love the way it turned out.  I picked a deep but slightly grayed-out coordinating blue for the setting blocks; I like it because even though it's a solid, it has a little bit of shimmer up close.  I picked these fabrics because I thought a more muted color palette would be good for something as big and ever-present as a bed quilt.  I also chose a blue dotted print for the main border and a pinky orange for the binding and small border; both picked up colors from the main print.

The colors are a little brighter than what came out in the picture, but they're pretty close.  Those three tiny scraps are all that I have left from the border fabric.  One of the annoying things about this project was that in order to have 8 matching very large star points, it took quite a bit of fabric and because each point was one big diamond, there was lots of odd shaped fabric left over.

The instructions were very easy to follow, and after assembling the large star, I added the borders.  I drafted some simple New York Beauty blocks for the corners and fussy cut flowers from my main print to fit the each corner of the block.

After assembling the top, I laid it out on my living room floor and marked some large quilting guidelines.  I wanted to have an overall circular pattern flowing through the background, you can kind of see it in my white pencil marks below (sorry for the crummy iphone pic).

Stay tuned tomorrow for the quilting and the finished product!