Frosted Stars

This quilt was made from a pattern by Charlie Scott from the Moda Bakeshop site.I found it quilt in a round about way. I was listening to the Stash Resolution podcast (look for a short review later), a new podcast for me at the time. Sarah, the host, mentioned the blog p.s. i quilt. I went to take a look and saw this quilt was recently posted to the Moda Bakeshop.

I really liked the colors of the stars and the way the quarter square triangles come together to make that odd shape in the middle of the star. I suppose I was attracted to Christmas quilts right at that moment,though I will never understand why as I never thought I would make a Christmas quilt. Too much work for a month a year. I do think that the expansion of “Christmas colors” to include some blues and tints of red and green have something to do with it. I love the red and green color combo, but sometimes it just looks too Christmasy.

p.s. i quilt had a kit, but I decided not to buy it as I didn’t like the basic grey fabrics that came with it. I liked the Kate Spain 12 Days of Christmas fabric better, so that was a possibility.Since I was thinking about going out and actually buying special fabric for a project, I thought it might be a good idea to test the pattern. I dug out the directions and went to work. I can’t say I was enamored with the directions from the Moda Bakeshop. It really too me a long time to make one block and I had to follow the directions step by step, because there weren’t cutting directions for one whole block at the beginning of the section where the star starts.

I redrew the block in EQ7 just to see what it would take to make some straightforward cutting directions. I can see why Charlie Scott used some fancy triangle tricks. I created rotary cutting directions in 12? and 9? (both finished) sizes. These blocks use quarter square triangles and the triangles need to be cut weird sizes, which I know nobody likes. Still, my directions are a lot more straightforward than those on the Moda Bakeshop page.

The project was a process and working through some of the issues made it fun. Since I bought a whole line of the Kate Spain fabric, I forced myself to use it. I wouldn’t have bought all of the prints, if I were buying them piecemeal, but I had them all and didn’t want them to go to waste. That meant a learning curve for the colors and the scale of the prints.

This pattern has a lot of leftover fabric, which annoyed me a bit. I don’t want to run short, but I ended up making a whole second quilt from the leftover fabric. That wasn’t in the plan. In November of 2010, I was done with the blocks and the Jelly Roll sashing and ready to put the quilt together. I tried a couple of different color options and finally settled on a turquoise batik, which was not part of the original fabric line, but worked perfectly.

I finished the top in mid-November 2010. The quilt top, without the final turquoise border is all on the bias and I just don’t believe in giving a quilt to a quilter with a bias edge border. Yes, I sent this out to be quilted. I just wanted this quilt to stay relatively square and adding another border was required. I don’t know why a pattern designer would finish off a quilt with a bias border. Perhaps it is some complicated part of a learning experience of which I am unaware.

The quilt was quilted by Colleen Granger and I thought I would give it away, but I liked it so much that I kept it.

Here are some posts about the quilt:
Frosted Stars Possibility
Frosted Stars Test
Frosted Stars Progress
Frosted Star Blocks Complete
Frosted Stars Color Choices
Frosted Stars Progress (2)

Threadbias project link