mariner’s compass quilt

The Yellow Daisy Festival Online Market begins on Tuesday, Sept 8th. In celebration of this, I’m making some posts about the quilts I have ready to go. Each day I’ll feature two or three quilts and tell about their process and what I like most about them. These and other quilts can be found in the Quest Quilts shop on this website or in my Etsy shop.

I’m going to be honest here; this quilt is my pride and joy. It’s a technique called paper piecing, and, as you can imagine, is quite time consuming. I’d wanted to make something like this for ages and had the paper templates printed over a year ago at least. They’d sat in a box in my sewing stuff, and I’d all but forgotten about them. When Covid hit, I had the time to focus on something that would take a while to do. I’d made a couple of these before, so I knew it would be a commitment.

I’m in love with the colors and really wanted to show a gradient with the rainbow shades. I’m proud that I was able to use all fabric that I already had on hand except for the white fabric. The border was an afterthought when I realized it needed something it help bring all the colors in line. The backing was fabric I’d bought on a whim, but I was in love with it. I used the rainbow on it to adjust the colors on the front. This has to be one of the prettiest ones I’ve made; it’s certainly one of the more technically difficult. My hope is that it finds a home where someone will hang it on a wall as a central focal point.

This quilt falls under the “things I’ve been meaning to make” category. English paper piecing is a tedious technique. Each star is made from a wedge, and each wedge is made of two scalene triangles. The design I used for this quilt was a simplest mariner’s compass pattern in the book. The pattern comes from the book Mariner’s Compass Stars by Carol Doak. I’d bought it years ago to make a gift for my husband.

I had originally wanted to make all the stars with batik fabrics, but it didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t going to have the effect I wanted with what I had on hand. The biggest goal of mine was to use 100% fabrics that I had at home in my stash already. I had the rainbow fabric for the backing and based my colors around it. This was definitely a “quarantine project.” In the end, the only thing that was purchased was some extra white thread. Not bad.

I did get to practice the colors and design on my new quilting software, so that was an extra bonus, and it helped me catch a mistake in my color placement. Can you see what I did?

EQ8 Quilting Software trial run with my colors.

I’ll admit that red fabric is notorious for running dye, even if one pre-washes like I do. This quilt had too much time and love put in to it to take any chances, so I pinned a color catcher sheet over the white sections of the red star. I did NOT come here to play.