Julie's Quilts and Costumes: Stella Nova on the Design Wall

After assembling the center starburst portion of my Stella Nova sample, it was time to figure out how to finish off the outside corners. My first choice would have been to continue the black background fabric all the way to the edges of the quilt.

That choice would be very striking and dramatic. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough of the black fabric. The black in the pieced area was a chunk pulled from my solids bin, and it had no identifying marks or notes on it. I know that using a different piece of black for the corners is likely to be obvious where the two meet up, so I started digging through my stash for other options. I pulled out several possibilities, then held auditions on the design wall and chose my favorite. It's an old Debbie Mumm print that I bought many years ago.

The other challenge was to figure out the shape for those corner pieces. I drew out one quarter of the quilt design on a large sheet of graph paper, and that showed me what to cut from my fabric. I needed eight of the pieces, four cut right side up and four reversed. The upper right corner shows the shapes that I had to cut.

After all that, I was able to cut the wedge shapes from my corner fabric and get it stitched to the center of the quilt. Here is my little Stella Nova quilt top which I am calling Autumn Starburst.