Evolution of a Quilt Top

I finished a quilt top! I'm not a terribly prolific quilt maker, so I have to celebrate my victories wherever I can find them. I started this top in a class offered by East Bay Heritage Quilters (EBHQ): David Sirota's Scrappy Chevron Star.

Leading up to the class, I thought about which fabrics I wanted to use. More of my plaids and stripes? Deep dive into the colorful scrap bin? Eventually I settled on the stack of solids I had left from my season of Tara Faughnan's Color Collective, and set about cutting myself some building blocks to be ready for class.

The class was an introduction to David's "No More Tears" Paper Piecing method. I'm not sure whether he means "no more crying" or "no more ripping paper," but both work in this case. I enjoyed the method and the class, and was happy with the star I made.

After class, I kept going. I re-sorted and cut more fabric, figuring I'd try to make a few stars in more limited colorways. Once I finished those three stars, I was out of my gray background fabric, which I took as a sign to stop and regroup.

I started to play with layout possibilities for a small quilt (each complete star is about 12" square). One of David's class samples has a layout something like the one below, but with sashing the same color as the background. Lacking any more of my background fabric, I auditioned some colors I did have.

None of the options I had really wowed me, so for the first time in a while, I went to the store and bought some fabric! (These days, for me, that counts as excitement.) Back home, I laid the washed and dried fabric on my design floor and started auditioning possible borders. Did I want neutrals or colors?

I decided I liked the happy colors... but then thought about whether I should use stripes or squares.

I decided the stripes distracted me from the stars, and I liked the squares better. But then I wondered whether the squares should be within the grid or on the outside. And at the same time, I tried turning the outside stars around so their points faced outward.

While I liked the squares as sashing, I felt like they took focus away from the stars. And while I liked the idea of a border on the outside, I felt like the fully enclosed border didn't allow the stars to breathe. To alleviate that problem, I tried leaving some space at the corners and played with the width of the gray sashing and inner border.

I ended up choosing 1.5" inner and outer gray sashing and 1" colorful squares as a border. Once I settled on the layout, final construction was pretty quick and simple. Ta da! Quilt top finished!

Now I just have to decide how to quilt it... Do you have any suggestions? Let me know in the comments!