Dancing Stars

Hi everyone!  Here we are at another Friday, three-fourths of the way through February.  Holy cow! I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, the year is already going so fast and 2019 needs to slow it down a bit. On the other, every day brings spring a lot closer, and I'm so ready!  It snowed *and* rained this week, and for a little while, it was doing both at the same time.  It was a very gray week, then when I went to take quilt pictures, the sun came out and everything looked pretty cheerful again.

I'm no weather person, but I think the sun came out just for the fun, colorful finish I have to show today. Here she is:

I call this quilt top Dancing Stars, because the blocks are dancing all across it.  I love how they're dancing and floating at the same time.  The sashing is the dots fabric that I had originally chosen, then changed my mind about.  Then I changed my mind again because the dots were busy enough to blend together and make it seem that the blocks were floating.  If you look very carefully, you can see the seams, but they all seem to melt together unless you're really inspecting it.

I made these blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge last year, and all of the fabrics except the sashing are legitimately scraps.  The blocks finish at 12 inches and were fairly fun to make.  When I've seen other quilts made like this, the stars are usually white, but I decided to have multicolor stars instead. I'm not sure about it now, but it certainly did add a lot of color.

A twisted sashing is the key to making the stars dance.  First I added sashing all around the block, then trimmed the sashing on a diagonal, like so:

Okay, I enhanced that line a bit so that we can actually see it. To get the angle I wanted, I started with two-inch sashing all around, then trimmed, tapering from 1/2 inch to 1-3/4 inches.  You can control the degree of tilt by the angle that you cut, and I've seen pictures of some quilts with multiple twisted sashings.  I added a very narrow border all around the quilt, mainly so that I could add the binding after quilting without worrying about losing points.

This quilt is going to a friend, and I have a colorful backing all ready for it.  What I don't have is batting! Somehow I have run out of large pieces of batting, and I don't have enough smaller pieces to stitch together.  I guess I have some shopping to do.  Isn't that tragic?

Hope everyone has a lovely, colorful weekend.  I am banishing the gray and have very colorful plans for my own weekend.  There may be balloons, and I'm pretty sure there will be birthday cake.  We'll see!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, Oh Scrap! and soscrappy for RSC19.