Rainbow Lone Stars

(and a new tutorial)

I started out making just the purple star with the intent to turn it into a wall hanging, but I was having such fun I decided I would make a four star baby quilt, then I thought I’ll make a six star lap quilt… and here I am with a nine star queen size quilt! This is another scrappy quilt made from only my stash (after all these scrappy quilts I’ve made during The Time of Covid, I have barely put a dent in my stash bins…) and if you look closely you can see the whites don’t match, but that just kind of adds to the scrappiness of the whole thing. At least that’s my opinion.

I worked on this quilt sporadically. I kept it on my design wall and I would pull out the blue bin and make the blue star, then put it on hold and do other projects, and so on. Until I had all the stars done and realized I had surpassed making a small quilt already… all this is to say don’t be afraid to take on a big project, just do it a little at a time, and eventually you’ll have a queen size quilt.

I’ve used this layout on other quilts – it’s called a Circle of Nine and it creates a lot of negative space and room for each star to breath. Not to mention all that wonderful emptiness to fill with quilting! And I sure did fill it – with graffiti quilting. It took me days and days to finish the quilting, but I’m happy with the results.

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Here are a few close up views of some of the stars with all the different quilting around them. This type of quilting adds such great texture to the finished quilt, and really is pretty much like doodling with a long arm quilting machine.

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And a few more shots of the quilting with the sun at an angle.

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A look at the back, and my little quilt label. I get these on Etsy (shop is called EverEmblem) and I couldn’t be happier with them. They are very high quality labels and don’t fray, even after washing numerous times.

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I took process photos while making one of the blocks, and have made a new tutorial with them. If you have some free time, please take a look and let me know if it makes sense. It’s on the main menu of my website under “tutorials”. I would truthfully appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for reading and happy quilting!

Ann