Well well well, it only took me about 2.5 years to get this Star Adventure up on the blog! Slow but steady wins the race.
In the Winter of 2023 we hosted a Star Adventure SAL. Alysson made her own quilt and I made this one. You can read up on all of our blogposts from the SAL here. And Alysson's finished quilt, the Star Adventure - the Cozy one, made its blog debut in December 2024. Now you may be wondering why it took us so long to get this Bella Star Adventure up on the blog and it's because right after we finished it, we hung it up high on the walls in our studio forgetting to take photos of it before. Whoops.
As you can see it looked PERFECT up on the wall above the bolts but it made it near impossible to photograph. That is until I finally took it down this week to dust it off and give her a photoshoot! PS. This photo is from the last open house we ever did in June of 2024. Open houses were a fun season for us at TCJ but one we happily closed the door on as well. It's a lot of work to transition a working studio space to a mini store for a weekend.
We released Star Adventure in May of 2023. Pause for quilty beauty.
We made six samples for the release. The Star Adventure pattern is robust and the amount of different material requirement combinations is endless. Which means I really wanted our SAL quilt to highlight something we hadn't done yet - an all solids Large Throw Mixed Stars option in the Adventurous Assembly (very similar to the Cover Quilt but now solid sashing, not gingham). If those words sound like gibberish to you, it's okay. I get it. But they do all make sense when you read the pattern.
In short, I wanted to use all FQs for the stars and the backgrounds, a solid fabric for the sashing, and make it all in the Large Throw size. This is the final mock up I used as my guideline for how to divide my fabrics into background and stars. In Week 1 of the SAL, I post all the possible mock up outcomes you could have from using this same color pull. It is wild how many gorgeous combinations you can make with the same fabric.
You can see how the colors are divided in a pretty obvious way - blues and pink/coral/golds with this dark roasted pecan color as the sashing. Yum yum. It was time to cut our fabrics and then mix and match our blocks!
The Large Throw sizes requires 30 Star Adventure blocks. That means each background fabric will be repeated two times and each star fabric will be repeated two times throughout the quilt. Now, it is up to the sewer if they want to keep the stars solid (points and center squares are from the same fabric) or mixed stars (points and center squares are from different fabrics). Or you can make all of your points first then build your blocks and go super scrappy! For this sample, we chose Mixed Stars. So each block will have one background fabric and two star fabrics.
In the Week 2 Star Adventure SAL blogpost, I give tips and tricks for mixing and matching your blocks.
For the Week 3 of the Star Adventure SAL, it was finally time to sew together 6 blocks!
So so fun! I love the Mixed Stars so much because I think three different fabrics in one block may be my favorite ratio. It makes me happy. And for Weeks 4 - 7 it was continuing to make 6 Star Adventure blocks a week.
And here is what the blocks were starting to look like half way through the SAL.
And our final 6 blocks!
And now all 30 blocks together!
This is a really enjoyable way to see the color variants within the two distinct sections of "background and stars". And you can see the fun interaction of all the stars being mixed up.
From here, it was time to put all the blocks up on the design wall and decide on our final lay out. We didn't mess around moving blocks very much, they basically stayed where I first put them.
I included the two black and white photos because it's easier to see tonal contrast. I wanted to be sure no where in the quilt top did it read too light or too dark all in one section. The easiest way to do that is just turning a photo black and white. It's a fun little trick when trying to space out blocks!
Now we added the roasted pecan sashing and had a finished quilt top!
We backed this Star Adventure in Bella Geranium which is a bold zesty coral red and we bound it in a linen brown gingham! The pantograph we chose is Starry Sawtooth and adds a beautiful texture. The back is especially fun. Emily of So Sunny Quilts did our long arming.
See the peak at the back? Let's take a closer look.
HELLO GORGEOUS. We did a shiny light blue thread and I love that is still shows a bit but isn't shouting LOOK AT ME.
There you go! Our finished Star Adventure - the Bella SAL one is officially on the blog! You can read up on all the SAL blog posts here and you can grab the Star Adventure pattern in the shop!