I recently took part in Emily Dennis’ Expanding Stars quilt along on Instagram. Over the course of five weeks, we followed Emily’s weekly prompts in order to complete her beautifully designed quilt.

On week one, we used the colouring worksheet from her pattern and selected our fabrics. I chose a variety of older and newer Cotton + Steel Basics.

On week 2, we started cutting out the fabric. As I was cutting my fabric, I was inspired to use this gorgeous Rifle Paper Co. Garden Party floral for a fussy-cut centre block instead of the magenta pictured above and for the navy in my Fabric F. I’m thinking I might use it for my binding too. It’s hard to tell from the photo but there are flecks of gold metallic throughout that give it a very rich look.

One week 3, we started sewing together the blocks. The quilt is made almost entirely of half square triangles so there was lots of precise sewing and trimming to square up the blocks afterwards. It doesn’t look like much in this photo but it took quite a bit of time to get these babies all squared up perfectly. I love how they look all stacked neatly. Most of the prints are not directional but the green print and the white dottie print do have a direction to them so I made sure to organize them accordingly so I could align them properly when laying out my pieces for the top.

Week 4 was piecing. I didn’t take a progress photo of the piecing process but once I finished stitching together the entire top, I stood back to admire its beauty and noticed that one HST was upside down. Bah! Out comes my favourite seam ripper!

By the end of week 4 I had a fabulous quilt top finished and ready for quilting. I’m so happy with how it turned out. You seriously can’t go wrong with Cotton + Steel Basics fabrics, they coordinate so beautifully and I love the strong contrast of the creamy fabrics with the bright teal and green.

Fabrics used:

All fabrics are Cotton + Steel
Fabric A: Garden Party
Fabric B: Add it Up — Bone
Fabric C: Stitch and Repeat — Avocado
Fabric D: Dottie — Kerchief White
Fabric E: Add it Up — Sea Glass
Fabric F: Garden Party