Wonky Star mini quilt

Today I will be linking up with Lily's Quilts 'Fresh Sewing Day'.
Earlier this year the lovely Rachael Daisy of Blue Mountain Daisy blog made an absolutely stunning wonky star doll quilt. We were taking part in the Doll Quilt Swap at the time and this wasn't even the one for her partner but an extra one she made out of left-overs! Here is a link to this inspirational quilt.
I totally lusted after this quilt and put it on my to-do list. I planned to make it for the first Brit Quilt Swap but got side tracked by a kaleidoscope design.

But I have a good friend's special birthday coming up and wanted to give her something hand made. And though I am VERY busy with shop and craft class commitments at the moment, it has been lovely to work on something fun. Here are some of my favourite stars. The middle fabric with hearts in the 2 blocks above is from the Frida Kahlo fabric I was sent by Marilyn Spiced Coffee when she was my partner in the Scrappy Pincushion Swap. It is almost too gorgeous to use.

I love this purple fabric, I have hardly any left and it is probably too old to get again now.

I wanted the quilt to be really wonky so divided the blocks into 5,6 and 7" squares, and then divided each of these blocks into a wonky 9 patch so that each patch was as different a size as possible.

Then i just roughly cut a piece of fabric for the 'star' and randomly sewed this across a corner.

I turned the right sides back together to trim to the size of the original patch.

And then trimmed the background fabric leaving 1/4" seam.

I really enjoyed making it, as I like playing around with colour and I much prefer to work in this 'freeform' way. I just can't do accurate piecing to a pattern, it always works out wrong and I am just too rebellious by nature!

Once I had all the blocks complete, I added some 'filler' panels to square it up and make it even more random.

 

Here is the finished top.

 

 I quilted around the stars with contrasting perle 8 (such a pleasurable way to quilt something small!).

And then there was so much going on that the pink flowery panel (Michael Miller's 'Peacock Lane') looked a bit empty. And I don't need much of an excuse to get my button tin out!

 The back is just a plain solid, but it does show off the quilting nicely.

And all finished on Monday! My friends's birthday is not for another week so I have some time to enjoy it at home.

And a big thank you to Rachael for her inital inspiration, this quilt is very much a homage to hers. I hope you like it Rachael! Go check out Rachael's lovely blog and also all the other new projects in LiLy's Quilts 'Fresh Sewing Day'.