Citrus Squeeze - A Modern Star Quilt

Well what a year we've all had!

It's caught us all off guard, made us re-evaluate everything, and learn to cope with new normals.

Earlier this year I was asked to design a special quilt for Homespun magazine, and we scheduled it for the June/July edition.

The design was drawn up, the fabric ordered, and then I waited.

And waited.

It was a very short lead time already, and so I needed that fabric like, the next day.

It took 6 weeks before it actually came, and by then we had rescheduled a new deadline, which was October's edition.

Of course it was made and sent away long before then. And only now when it's finally come back to me, I can share it with all of you.

For this quilt I used the gorgeous Primavera fabric range by Rifle Paper Company.

Here's some of it glowing in my studio in the afternoon sun.

Primavera is a rich botanical range, with glints of gold throughout, and a lovely mix of large and small prints.

I designed a large 60" x 60" throw sized quilt, with repeating star blocks, all joined with an Irish Chain formation.

I had it quilted in soft pink thread by Elite Quilting, a local business here. This is the densest quilting I've ever had done, and it's just the bees knees I think.

The flowers and leaves echo the fabric design perfectly.

I feel it's one of those quilts that keeps you gazing longer and longer as you discover more and more going on.

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I kept the front light and bright, using the cream star print in conjunction with Kona Snow, my favourite creamy white.

The backing is the dramatic teal fruit design, a favourite feature of mine to put on the back of a quilt...an unexpected surprise.

You can also see how I had to fudge in the last 1 1/2" of one corner on the backing when I was just short.

In my mind's eye, I had imagined a quilt with large, swishy tassels hanging from the corners, and that led me to wonder what eyelets in the corners would look like.

Did people even do such things to their quilts?

Was I allowed to punch a big hole in each corner?

Would I ruin my quilt??

Then I reminded myself like I remind everyone else...there are no quilt police.

Do it if you want to.

Learn from your mistakes.

And so I did.

Here are the chubby, swishy, sparkly tassels.

This yarn is the perfect match with the fabric range, even down to the gold thread.

It was marked down to a stupid price at Spotlight too, making it about $2 per tassel.

The eyelet setter was something we have at my husband's work, and so after a quick experiment on a pretend 'corner', I determined that there wasn't really any reason not to try.

Gulp.

It was still pretty nerve wracking cutting a bit hole like that tho. Four to be exact!

If you'd like to give these tassels a try, click through to my full tutorial here.

I will be taking these off to wash the quilt, and I have a plan for how to make them fully detatchable, so stay tuned for that!