Star Crossing QAL: Week 1

Mar 12

Written By Ellie Q

Welcome to Week 1 of the Star Crossing QAL!
I'm so glad you've decided to join the fun!

If you still need to purchase the pattern, you can find it here.

Week 1 is all about fabric selection.

Sometimes I design a quilt with fabrics in mind, and sometimes I design a quilt and then find the perfect fabric. When I saw these rainbow prints (Over the Rainbow by Ampersand Design Studio) from Paintbrush Studio Fabrics, I was smitten. I knew they'd work perfectly with my Star Crossing design.

Sidenote: Isn't that selvedge adorable?!

I started with the prints--I knew where the stripe would go, but needed to figure out spots for the large and small rainbows and the dots. I really wanted to use the tiny rainbow stripe on the quilt front, but it was too busy for a background and didn't have enough contrast for the stars. So it became the backing.

Next came selecting the solids for the medium and small stars. I passed on blue, since already had a blue in the dot fabric. I chose four main rainbow colors featured in the prints. I knew they'd pop against the white background, and I liked that they were two sets of complementary colors. I paired them up like that in the design as well--the purple and yellow are adjacent to each other, as are the red and green--for maximum pop.

Painter's Palette Solids: Lipstick 121-066, Lemon Ice 121-087, Jade 121-039, Purple 121-047

A suggestion about background fabric choices: Consider carefully if you want to use a directional fabric. If you're using a solid or a non-directional print, there's no extra thinking required. If you choose a directional print, you have two options: 1) ignore the directionality (works well with something like at newspaper-style text print), or 2) do careful cutting to keep your fabric "face up." I'll talk more about this during cutting next week, but i wanted to point it out this week.

Here's my completed fabric selection: