Hey Everyone, welcome back to Story Time Monday.

A few years ago while I was still living in Australia I designed this quilt called Woven Stars. This quilt is made up of 2 blocks in the body of the quilt which together create a secondary design. I love how secondary designs are created within a quilt design especially ones that give the illusion of movement. Woven Stars was my third quilt that I designed for Arbee Designs.

Not only do you have a crisscross design but there is also a box design, a star design and a pinwheel design which I hadn’t really noticed before. The box design is created around the Square In A Square block. The blocks within the quilt top are 8 inch blocks.

The 2 blocks make a secondary square design within the quilt

The 8 pointed star is created around the Churn Dash block.

The 2 quilts blocks also create a third design of an eight pointed star

This quilt is made with a monochromatic colour scheme. I chose greens on the yellow-green/olive-green side of the colour wheel. A balance of value within the colour scheme is very important in order for the pattern to work and create the secondary patterns within the quilt. A dark, medium and light value of the green was used to create contrast and then I threw in a high intensity brighter green to create even more contrast within the quilt pattern but still remained within the same colour family.

The border was a bit of a challenge as I wanted it to be different but yet complement the quilt. It took a lot of mock ups on the design wall before I was happy with the results. Once I decided on the design then I had to choose which fabric to use as the main border fabric and what fabrics to create the diamonds with. Here are a few samples below.

I tried the light fabric as the main border.

The lightest fabric being used as the main border fabric

Then the bright fabric.

The bright fabric as the main border fabric

And the dark fabric.

The dark fabric as the main border fabric

Finally the medium fabric which was the one I went with.

The medium fabric as the main border fabric

Each of the above examples also shows a different combination of fabrics for the diamonds. The final choice for the diamond fabrics took a while of juggling, placing, looking and this is the winner.

Final pick on the fabric combination for the diamond block

The final fabric combo for the border.

The final border combination

Quilting the piece was easy as I had already chose the stipple with star motif to go along with the name Woven Stars. The only problem I had was that I ran out of thread and didn’t have anther spool. Living in the Australian Outback in the middle of nowhere I just couldn’t hop over to the local quilt shop so had to order in a spool. Now when I do a larger quilt I always buy 2 spools of thread so that I don’t run into this problem ever again.

Close up of the quilting

The quilt can be made in many different sizes and the pattern has fabric requirements for 3 different sizes. The one pictured at the top of the page is 65″ x 81″.

When I returned to Canada I made another one with an achromatic plus colour scheme – what a different look it has. This one is 49″ x 65″. Perfect little lap quilt for the couch.

Achromatic Plus version of the quilt

The secondary pinwheel design is quite noticeable with this colour combination.

The secondary pinwheel design

I love both of them but I do really like how that peachy-red just gives the achromatic one a little extra punch.

Happy Quilting!