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.

Autumn Starburst, 37" square

Linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Making at Love Laugh Quilt

Needle & Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

Stash Report and Stitching Time 3/27/2022

Like last week, today's stash report shows more fabric coming in than going out. There were several projects that I worked on during the week, but none of them used up much fabric. I added a small border to my Feathered Star Round Robin quilt and the binding to Boston Fiesta. I also made 36 Rail Fence blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. You can see those blocks in yesterday's post HERE.

The project that used the largest amount of fabric, plus filled the majority of my time last week, was a sample of the Stella Nova pattern. Stella Nova is a kit and pattern that I bought recently (shared in last week's stash report post.) The pattern instructions were rather confusing for me, so I decided to make a partial sample with some scrap fabrics to be sure I could figure it out. Here's my reduced Stella Nova in autumn colors.

My sample piece measures about 34" across and is made up of 3 rounds of diamonds. Those black strips between all the diamonds start out as 1" cut strips. The original Stella Nova pattern has 7 rounds of diamonds, plus additional corner sections. The pattern instructions say to cut 58(!) strips of the black, 1" x width of fabric. If only I had an AccuQuilt cutter! This is a very intimidating project, and I'm not sure that I'm up for it right now. I'll keep you posted.

The additions to the stash this week came from a wonderful scrap package that I won in a giveaway from Preeti. If you aren't familiar with her blog (sewpreetiquilts), you should definitely check it out. She is amazingly creative and productive, plus she always has great stories to go along with her quilts.

Anyway, I received a mailer stuffed full of scraps and chunks, mostly light/low volume prints or batiks. Here's a photo of the beautiful batiks. Several of them are fat quarter or quarter yard pieces.

The total weight of the scraps was about 2 pounds. I am counting that as 6 yards added to the stash, approximately 3 yards per pound.

2022 STASH TOTALS

Used last week:            3.25 yards

Used year to date:        20.5 yards

Added last week:            6.0 yards

Added year to date:      28.5 yards

Net added in 2022      8.0 yards

Kate's 15 Minutes to Stitch Challenge at Life in Pieces has us tracking how many days each week we get in at least 15 minutes of stitching time. As you might guess from the list of projects in the stash report, I definitely spent more than 15 minutes stitching every day last week.

15 Minute Challenge for 2022: 

3/20 - 3/26         7 of 7 days

2022 Total       85 of 85 days

Check out more stash reports at quiltpaintcreate and join the 15 Minutes to Stitch challenge at Life in Pieces. 

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA