Scrappy quilt with stars

Create this scrappy quilt with stars using fabrics you’ve been collecting over the years. It will add vibrant colors to your home decor!

Spiral Galaxies appears in the June issue of American Patchwork & Quilting magazine, hitting the stands on April 18! It measures 72-1/2″ x 81-1/2″ with 10″ star blocks and 9″ nine-patches with half-square triangles. It features bakits from my extensive collection. No single fabric was purchased for the quilt, including the (pieced) back, which I will show you soon.

One day, I was testing the block above for a Block of the Month pattern I had designed. I enjoyed sewing it and wondered what a whole quilt made with this single block would look like. When I had a chance, I began auditioning fabrics from my batik stash. The stars would have a gradation of colors beginning with a dark center. It took me a while to select the fabrics, ensuring I had enough of each for placement on each part of the block.

Then, I began piecing them together. Soon, I had a wall full of cool blocks and a heart full of joy! All I had figured out was I wanted to end up with a scrappy quilt with stars. I had no idea what it would look like when completed.

The American Patchwork & Quilting magazine article shows the easy step-by-step block construction. I prefer to assemble one color combination at a time, so after I cut and sorted the fabric pieces together, I grabbed my headphones, selected one of my favorite long books to listen to again, and began sewing.

This is the beauty of one-block quilts. Once you get in the groove, you can enjoy a book or a movie while sewing. (I’ve never watched a movie while sewing quilt blocks, have you?)

I piled the corners I trimmed from the blocks without knowing what I would do with them. When all the star blocks were made, I tackled that pile and turned them into half-square triangles while listening to the book, so the sewing went unnoticed.

Then, when I counted the half-square triangles, I realized I only needed to cut and sew a few extra ones to make enough blocks for the border. And that is how this quilt came about!

Today is a flip/flop kind of day: it is sunny now and will be cloudy in 5 minutes, so my photographs are iffy. However, you can see how the quilt is so colorful with enough negative space around the stars to show off the wonderful texture of each fabric. I am in love! Except, this morning, my sister wrote that the quilt is “ma-ra-vi-lho-so” (wonderful in Portuguese, with hyphens to ensure I understood her feelings), and I think she may end up with it on her bed some day!

Ah, the backing! I was determined to use all fabrics from my stash, so I gathered the largest pieces and stitched them together until I had the size I needed. Piecing backings is not my favorite thing to do, but I am always happy with the results when I do. Excuse me while I do the math to figure out how much money I saved by doing it!

Something about batik fabrics tugs at my heart. My favorite quilts were made with them (see Zen Life, Sunnyside Lane, Spring Fest, and Spring in Cape May, to name a few). The fabric I used to bind Spiral Galaxies was perfect as it had many colors from the quilt center. My batik collection will deliver more surprises soon! I may need to purchase background fabric, though.

Here it is, Spiral Galaxies, my scrappy quilt with stars, in all its glory. Twenty years ago, I would not have dreamed that one day I would be making scrappy quilts. Yet, here I am.

Have a great weekend!