You're a Star Mini Quilts

Today I'm happy to be a part of the project tour for Conservatory, a gorgeous fabric line designed by Jill Finley for Riley Blake Designs. The flowers and the blues are right up my alley! 

The main print in the line was practically calling my name through the computer screen, which was kind of odd for me. The print and the colours are beautiful, but the scale is larger than I usually work with. I'm more a blenders kind of quilter, especially since I tend to like to cut things into really small pieces (right, Anja? 😄). 

This picture isn't great for showing the colour. I snapped it quickly, indoors, before cutting into the fabric.

I think it was a combination of the shapes of the flowers and the bright, cheerful colours that made me need to include this fabric in my quilt. I'm so glad I did! Even just ironing it and cutting it made me happy.

The same print also comes in a blue and white version and I love that one, too. While I was designing the mini quilt I'd make for today, in EQ8, I kept trying to include both the multi-colour and the blue and white versions, but it never seemed to work for the small quilt. The only solution, of course, was to make two mini quilts!

Here are my two You're a Star mini quilts, which finish at 30" square. The white background is Riley Blake's Confetti Cotton solid. I had so much fun making these!

The yellow from Conservatory is a happy, sunny colour and it adds a bright pop to the star with the multi-colour print. This one just feels like summer to me 😊

And the green with the blue and white makes this one feel more sophisticated.

Do you want to make your own You're a Star mini? Enter your email address in the form below to get the free pattern. Doing so will also subscribe you to The Bulletin, which I send out twice a month. I hope you'll enjoy reading it! 😊

Once they were pieced and basted with scrap pieces of Warm and Natural batting (yay for getting to use up some of those scrap pieces!) and more Confetti Cotton solids for the backings, it was time to play with some fun quilting. I had no clue how I would quilt them, except that I wanted the two stars to be completely different. In my usual fashion, I just made it all up as I went along.

I used Aurifil 50 wt thread for all of the piecing and the quilting. I started with 2600 for the multi-coloured star, quilting back and forth lines to accentuate the star, and some continuous curves in the triangles of the center economy block.

Then I added wishbones in 2135 in the yellow triangles (I can't find a link for just the yellow, but here's a 12 spool box that includes it along with 11 other gorgeous colours). Then I had fun adding various flowers in 2024 in the white parts inside the star. For the background, I quilted a loops and flower meander. This one is so simple to stitch, but looks so good. It adds to the carefree, summer vibe of this mini, I think.

For the blue and green quilt, I used 2780 to quilt continuous curves in the blue star points, then filled them in with quick back and forth lines. Then I quilted some flower petals in the blue triangles of the center economy block. I used 1231 to quilt straight-ish lines in the green triangles. I used my free motion foot for them, to avoid turning the quilt a million times and just used the width of the foot as my guide. None of them are perfectly even or straight, but I like the imperfections.

Then it was time to quilt the background and I wanted to do lines radiating from the center. I used my long ruler and my hera marker to mark the lines in ⅛ of the quilt, aiming for the lines to be about 1" apart at the outside edge of the quilt. Somewhere along the way I went astray, though, so the lines were slightly closer together in the corner than in the center. I wasn't about to rip anything out, so I just measured the distance at the edge between the quilted lines and marked the rest of the quilt so the lines would be more or less the same. Turns out I really like the way it looks with the lines more concentrated in the corners.

I don't like how quilts poof up when a whole bunch of radiating lines converge in one place, so I opted to reduce the number of lines in the white portions of the star. In the center of the economy block the lines are only horizontal, vertical and diagonal to the corners. In the next white sections, there are five lines in each triangle. I marked them with the hera marker again, with the lines matching up with the lines outside the star. I think I went a little astray again, and those lines don't quite match up if you look closely, but I'm probably the only one who will ever look that closely, though I'll forgive you if you looked since I pointed it out, lol.

I chose the mutli-colour flower print for one binding and the green for the other, to give both quilts a nice frame.

Zachary, my 16 year old, loves to get out to practice driving, so about 15 minutes after I finished the bindings we headed out the door for the beach to hopefully get some pictures. It was raining a little when we left, but I was really hoping the rain would stop by the time we reached the beach, which is about 20 minutes away, and it did! Beach rocks and ocean make the perfect backdrop for quilts, don't you think?

I couldn't resist taking a picture of the quilts on the bright blue picnic tables. There are bright pink tables, too. I'll need to make a quilt to match them sometime.

Don't forget to get your free pattern using the form above! I can't wait to see what colours you choose for your version 😊

Thank you to Riley Blake for supplying the fabric for these mini quilts. They really make me smile 😊

I'm linking up with Sarah's Show Me Something with Stars party.