Riley Blake Fabric Challenge

Last week I finished a mini quilt I designed and made for the Modern Quilt Guild’s latest fabric challenge. This is Creative Rockstar fabric by Tara Larson of Rad & Happy for Riley Blake — and fortunately I signed up in time to get several fat eighths free in the mail! I knew I wanted to make a mini quilt and inspiration struck when I came across a collection of “sacred geometry” designs. I loved this expanding pentagon star shape and knew it would be the perfect way to show off some of these fabrics. I quickly whipped up a paper piecing pattern for it and off I went!

(Side note: making my own paper-pieced patterns is one of my new favorite things. It’s so fun to make the pattern itself, and so satisfying to then see the design come to life with real fabric!)

I fussy cut the center piece to highlight the word “create” in the center, and cut the other fabrics to make sure that the whole design felt like it was radiating outward with the star shape. So the blue lines swirl around the smallest star, the triangle print lines up with the larger star points it forms, and even the plus signs are aligned to flow out and away from the center. I’m so happy with the overall effect!

For the quilting, I started by stitching in the ditch along all of the seams, then added a line of big stitch quilting around the outside with some blue embroidery floss. My sister recently sent me two boxes of floss that belonged to my grandmother with hopes that I’d put it to good use, so I was happy to find a bit of blue in there that perfectly matched my fabrics!

After that I stared at it for a little while debating what to do next. I almost stopped there, but decided to go farther and added an echo line inside the big star points and then quilted lines in the larger pentagon about 1/2″ apart. I’m so glad I did because I really love the texture of the finished quilt! I almost used white for the binding, but made a last-second decision to feature one more of the prints in the fabric collection and I think that was the right call.

(I took these photos on Friday afternoon before finishing the binding on Friday night, so yes, those are pins on the binding.)

I submitted this entry to the fabric challenge on Friday. I have no idea whether it’ll be good enough to get any recognition, but I really love how it turned out and that’s the important part!