Stars In a Time Warp - Update, Weeks 30, 31, 32 & 33

I took some time this past weekend to get caught up on my stars from the Stars In A Time Warp QAL by Barbara Brackman.  These past few weeks of stars have been very interesting and a bit challenging, but always educational!  I find myself noticing certain things in fabrics now that I had not in the past.

Here are my stars for the past four weeks. I have provided a link back to each week's fabric lesson.

Week 30 - Floral Trails - pretty self explanatory.  A meandering floral trail.  I found these two fabrics on my recent trip to Lancaster.  Love them together.

Week 31 - Toiles - flowers, birds, portraits, landscapes, literature and current events.  Because of the complexity of these designs they were printed in one color on white. The brown block on the lower right has a floral toile in the background.

My toiles have a lot of bird motifs.

I, like a lot of quilters, love toiles.  I have them in pastels and darker colors.  It was hard to chose which ones to use.  You can see here that I stayed with the darker shades.  The pastels just seemed too soft with my other star blocks.

Just playing with some stars and toiles

I have been doing some thinking on how to set my star blocks.  There are a lot of choices and Barbara typically ends her post with several suggestions and examples.  I did some playing with my star blocks by adding a toile between my blocks. Hmmm.... still undecided.  But I sure like the idea of using  a toile.

Week 32 - Faded Synthetic Dyes - In the last quarter of the 19th Century dyers experimented with synthetic dyes.  Green dyes were very unreliable.  Some of these greens faded to a khaki color.

I picked up this 'faded green' fabric while in Lancaster since I knew I didn't have this color in my stash!

Week 33 - Later Turkey Reds - Late-19th-century prints retained the

bright red backgrounds but figures were often just dark brown or black

and/or white

I have so many reds, but chose these because of the black figure in both fabrics. 

This week's fabric was golden brown... I know I have that!

Happy Stitching,

Deb