So, here’s a funny story… I designed this week’s Sunday sketch a few years ago, and loved it so much (SO MUCH!) that I held back on posting it so I could make it into a quilt first. Often I’ll get excited about a design and fall down a rabbit hole of fabric selecting and online ordering… and then I lose interest (it’s the paradox of choice). But with this one, I actually made it!

Here’s the sketch (check out the acid yellow!)…

And here’s the actual quilt!

 

It’s a little hard to tell in that pic, but I bound the quilt in the acid yellow. Thanks to Valerie of Sweet Gum Quilting for the horizontal 1/2″ straight-line quilting, which I love.

So anyway, after I bound the quilt, I packed it away so I could take a proper photo eventually… and then forgot all about it. Oops. Which is kinda crazy, cos I still LOVE this design. It’s so simple, yet it works so well with a huge range of palettes.

With a dark background…

…and a light one.

This is a 5 x 5 block layout with a 5-colour palette, and each block contains three elements (the middle square, the star arms, and the background squircle). That combination means that each colour can be used once per row and per column in each of the three elements. Although if you look closely enough, you’ll see that I had to break that rule in a few places.

Including white in the 5-colour palette means that a few stars don’t have a background squircle. I like how that opens up the design a bit and adds some negative space for the eye to rest. (The sashing between the blocks helps with that too.)

You can see that despite all the possible block permutations (3 elements x 5 colours), there are still a few blocks that are repeated in the previous versions. I tried again with the colour placement to avoid repetition, but it’s not easy! These next two versions feel a smidge ‘heavier’ to me, but maybe the larger number of unique blocks just makes the design seem busier?

Of course, you could avoid the difficulty of colour placement by using fewer colours and going with just two blocks in an alternating layout.

I also like alternating the ‘full’ star blocks with the ‘bare’ star blocks, which lightens the design a bit more.

I know I’ve only used solid colours in these variations, but I think this design is one that would work really well with prints, particularly a coordinating range of fabrics.

This week’s sketch could be made into a quilt using quarter-circle (or drunkard’s path) units, triangle-in-a-square units (or half-rectangle triangles), squares, and sashing. I know a lot of people don’t like using sashing, but I like how it opens up a quilt design and lets the blocks breathe a little. OK, that sounds weird, but basically quilts feel less crowded to me when they have sashing.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve ever re-made the same quilt design before, but I’m very tempted to make another one of these quilts. It was awhile ago that I made it, but I’m pretty sure it came together quickly, as there are only a few basic shapes you need to make. As usual for me, the longest part was deciding on the colour palette.