Night Sky Wedding Quilt

I don't even want to admit how long ago I intended to post this blog - let's just say it's been quite a while!  I would have gotten around to it much sooner if I'd been able to access the photos that were meant for this post - it's always something, right?

I first talked about this project in this post.  The Night Sky Quilt was a wedding gift for a friend I have known for almost 18 years, and I designed the pattern myself.  I didn't want to share pictures of it until after she and her husband opened it, just in case they got back to her, so here they finally are!

As you can see, I'm still working on finding an easy place to hang quilts for picture-taking.  I'm on my tiptoes on a chair behind this queen-size, and you're still missing out on some of the edges!

I have a friend in my fabulous long-arm quilter Lyn.  She has done all of the long-arm for my mom and I, and she really truly lets the fabrics speak to her.  If you're in East Central MN and looking for a quilter, let me put you in touch with her!

Night Sky is really a simple pattern - with the exception of the stars, it's all squares!  I think the hardest part of this pattern was laying it out and then keeping it straight while my dog and nephew were busy trying to get in the way!  As you can see here, it has a scrap quilt look to it, but I used mostly fat quarters to give it that feel.  This quilt reminded me of a very important lesson - fat quarters do not cut in the same dimensions as a quarter-yard!  A few of the fabrics came up a few squares short of what I had so meticulously planned for them.  As always in quilting, adapt and overcome!

I hope you love Night Sky!  If you have any questions about my design process, measurements, the finished product, or anything, leave me a comment.

Quilt Designing

Like most females my age, I have an addiction to Pinterest. While I think Pinterest is fantastic with its sea salt body scrub recipes and fastest way to fit abs workout routines, one of the drawbacks of Pinterest is that your pins don't necessarily go anywhere.  This is especially true of my favorite Pinterest subject, quilting. I pin quilts because I love the picture – whether it's the colors, the pattern, or the textures that draw me in – without regard to where that picture leads. 

A couple months back, I spent an afternoon searching through my quilting board, looking for just the right pattern for a childhood friend's wedding gift. I finally found what I wanted in this Flickr picture:

photo credit

Unfortunately, that's all it was, just a photo with no link to a pattern, credit to a designer, description, or even a size.  That left me with few options, now that I was feeling like this had to be the quilt for them.

I decided to design my own pattern for a quilt inspired by the picture.  There are many upsides to making your own patterns, one being that you get the size you're looking for (my best guess would be that the quilt in the picture is twin- or full- sized, and I wanted a queen-sized).  Pattern making in quilting is easier than you might think, especially for a quilt that contains only basic shapes, in this case squares and half-square triangles.

These two items are my quilt designing must-haves: graph paper (any size you choose) and a fabric calculator.  Graph paper is essential.  At the heart, almost every single quilt is based on a series of squares and rectangles manipulated and arranged into beauty, and the graph paper helps get all those shapes into proportion without hours staring at a ruler.  I always have my FabriCalc with me during designing sessions, purely because it's faster to calculate yardage than using a pencil and regular calculator.  I highly suggest buying a fabric calculator only during sales, at a JoAnn/Michaels – my mom and I did so on Black Friday and got ours 50% off.

Other items you'll want to have handy:

• pencil (I think mechanical work best) with an eraser that won't smear
• colored pencils
• a pen to help differentiate between different areas where colors are similar
• scratch paper to write down yardages, do math, or whatever else you might need

With only those supplies and a short amount of time, you can have the pattern you want!  I finished my pattern in less than an hour – it probably wouldn't have taken that long, but I rearranged the stars a half-dozen times or so.

The final product

I will post pictures of the finished quilt in about two weeks, after my friend's wedding.  Right now, it is complete except for the binding, and I am very proud of it.  Here's hoping the happy couple loves it!

Leave any questions about my pattern making process in the comment section, and I'll be happy to answer them!