Bright Sky QAL: Choosing Your Fabric

As always, feel completely free to choose whatever fabric you like! Should you wish for some points and tips, read on…

There are 4 main “zones” of fabric: the centre square, the inner star points, the outer star diamonds and the outer star points. For each zone, the minimum fabric requirements are fat quarters – 1 fat quarter for the centre square, 1 fat quarter for the inner star, 1 fat quarter for each diamond and 1 fat quarter for each pair of outer star points.

Fat Quarters

Being the perfect pattern for fat quarters, Bright Sky naturally lends itself to a more scrappy effect. You can choose to work completely scrappy or work within a colour palette.

This Dreamin’ Vintage bundle would be a fun riot of prints but still very cohesive in colour. I’d use the green flower print for the centre square with the white-background “stripes” for the inner square and then spread the other prints around for a splashin’ awesome quilt.

Or you could restrain your choices to a colour palette and select one colour per zone but different prints. This Best. Day. Ever! blue and green fat quarter bundle is perfect for this approach to choosing fabric – use one of the “feature” prints for the centre square, the lighter blue for the inner star, and the remaining greens and dark blues for the outer star points and diamonds!

Something like this Emma’s Garden bundle would work beautiful as a mid-way option for the scrappy effect – the purples and aquas are perfect for the outer star points and diamonds and the butterflies for the centre square!

The pattern is also perfect for showing off big-scale or feature prints. A collection like Story Book by Kate & Birdie is a great example with a mix of feature prints to use for the centre square and elsewhere, and some simpler coordinating prints to match.

If any of these fabrics look good to you, or you want something new, Shabby Fabrics is offering 15% off one order per customer for the duration of the QAL until November 21st – just use the code BrightSkyQAL! And that’s on top of the 20% off discounted international shipping rates.

Yardage

If you would prefer to work with fewer prints, than you will need some yardage for the outer star zones – a yard each for the diamonds and outer star points, should you wish for them to be all the same print.

My Quilts

For my original Bright Sky quilt, I worked with a colour palette, using my centre square feature print as inspiration. I pulled the purple, pink and aqua from the Cuzco print and used those for the rest of the quilt – 1 pink print for the inner star, 4 aqua prints for the diamonds and 4 purple prints for the outer star.

You can see that I carefully balanced the different purple prints around the outer star by placing each print on opposite corners of the star. This also helps to balance out the saturation levels so that one side of the quilt doesn’t look more “heavy” than the others.

For the QAL, I’m going monochromatic with a touch of gradient effect from a lighter inner to a darker outer. This time, I’m using the same print (Drawn Destiny Denim from Legacy) for all my diamonds and 2 different prints for the outer star points. I will alternate the outer star prints to keep it saturation levels balanced. The Legacy print is a similar colour to the rest of the fabrics but it’s a bit brighter and adds some depth – I like to think it will have the diamonds sparkling! I’ve even picked out a potential binding fabric that was originally reserved for another WIP, but may work perfectly for this quilt. I will see once it’s finished!

The winner of the giveaway from last week was Diann B. – congratulations!