Hi friends!
Welcome to today’s post on Novalie– a new star quilt pattern! Last week we introduced our 2 new starry skies quilts designed by me and Tammy Silver of Tamarinis. And today we are focusing more on Novalie!
I love this little quilt! (Haha, I know, when don’t I LOVE one of my quilts?)
Novalie was inspired by one of the blocks in our block of the month quilt Luminous. We wanted to play with the block and create an exploding star quilt.
The Design Process for a new star quilt
The process involved us emailing back and forth, one of us tweaking the idea, then the other making more changes, one of us taking elements out, one of us adding elements back in… until we had a design we both loved.
In Luminous, we created that pattern also as a color challenge. The question was: How would a quilt look done in 2 different ways; one with a light background and one with a dark background? We decided to continue the challenge and, because Tammy loves her dark backgrounds, she got to do the dramatic one!
We also decided to use fabrics from Island Batiks basics lines- they have solids, and what they call basics, blenders and neutrals. By using these, we weren’t locked into one fabric line that is only around for a short period of time.
My fabrics
For my dawn version of the quilt, while I decided to keep to a very light background, I wanted to stretch myself and go for a color scheme that was slightly outside of my normal range. So that meant no aqua! Aqua and shades of blue are my go to color scheme.
I saw this print and thought, that would be fun to work with!
Using the print, I picked other colors to work with it.
That was the fairly easy part- though it can be challenging sometimes to pick fabrics on the computer. It’s not the same as standing in the quilt shop looking at the fabrics in person is it?
Adding color to the Design
The harder part was choosing where each of the fabric would go. I REALLY wanted to use the print in the quilt top. But because it is a multicolor print, it just seemed to muddy up the design. I tried it everywhere- the large star point, in all the small areas… nope.
I am so lucky I can play around in E8 to try the fabrics in different areas to come up with a color scheme that works!
It wasn’t until I remembered to use it as the inspiration and not as the focus fabric, that the color scheme came together!
And the print was perfect as the binding! It pulled the quilt top together and added a bit of interest but wasn’t too much color on the edge.
Quilting the quilt
I really like the quilting on this quilt as well. (What? no Love? No, I love it!) Since most of my quilts are quilted “by checkbook”, I usually have them quilted with an all over design. Why? Because that is what fits in my budget.
Just because you use an all over design, doesn’t mean it won’t look good! The quilting design we picked for Novalie adds to the overall design and draws your eye around the quilt. The thread color is noticeable but not bold; I think it was just right!
That is not to say that custom quilting wouldn’t be awesome! Click here to hear more about Tammy’s Novalie quilt- the quilting on it is amazing!
What color scheme would you use for Novalie?
Novalie is such a fun quilt to make; the small size makes it fairly quick to piece and then you could use it as a wall hanging, table topper or a crib quilt!
Next week we will share more about our other new starry skies quilt, Astria!
happy quilting,
Kate