Stardust Shine Quilt — Make it Scrappy!

Since releasing my Stardust Shine quilt pattern, I’ve noticed a lot of curiosity regarding what fabric I used in the scrappy version of my quilt — so I gathered up all the leftover scraps I could find, as well as some tips to help you make your own scrappy Stardust Shine.

Instead listing out all the fabric names, I think it’s more important to talk about how I selected my fabric — especially since many of these fabrics are out of print!

I know there are quilt pattens that are specifically designed to be scrappy and the more fabric you use the better — not much thought is put into color, the crazier the better! This definitely isn’t one of those patterns, but I will show you how any pattern written for yardage can be made scrappy.

I designed Stardust Shine so that your chosen fabric would show up in specific places around the quilt top. That is an integral element of the design, so when making it scrappy you must keep that in mind. Rather than using any scrap of fabric you have in any location, to make this work we must switch our thinking from individual fabric selections to color choices.

For this quilt top I chose the following colors for each of the fabrics the pattern calls for:

Fabric 1 — Light Pink

Fabric 2 — Light Blue

Fabric 3 — Navy

Fabric 4 — Red

Fabric 5 — Yellow

Fabric 6 — Bright Pink

Like many who have been sewing for a while, I tend to buy fabric simply because I like it without any project in mind and save any left-over bits from sewing projects. I organize my fabric yardage by color and have all my scraps in bins that are loosely based on color as well. I also had been purposely building up my collection of low volume (whites and creams) fat quarters and yardage, knowing that someday I wanted to try making a fully scrappy quilt. Because of this, I don’t think I had to purchase any fabric for this project, but you easily could and still end up with the same result.

Regardless if you use your personal fabric stash to gather fabric or head to the local quilt shop, the idea is the same. Once you’ve chosen your colors, you will select fabric that all has a similar hue for your chosen color. If you look at my swatches of light pink fabric, you’ll see that there’s some variation in the shades of light pink — some are more saturated than others, some more peachy, while others are a true pale pink — but overall, if you squint your eyes at them, none stand out too much.

That’s the goal for all the colors needed: some variation, but none stick out too much.

This is especially true when two or more of your colors are similar. For example, I used both light pink and bright pink. I had to be careful that none of the fabric I used made the line between the two confusing. There were several medium pink fabrics I could have used but didn’t because it was too hard to decide which group it belonged in and therefore would have muddied the clear separation between the two hues.

However, you’ll see that I used a much broader classification for my light blue fabric. This works because there was nothing to confuse it with. Though I also used navy blue, those fabrics were all so dark the line between the two remained distinct.

If you don’t already have a fabric stash to pull from, or need to supplement what you do have, purchasing fat quarters is a great way to build up a variety of fabric for a project like this. Some shops even sell fat quarter bundles by color hue which would be perfect for swapping out yardage for a scrappy style.

It takes a bit more time to cut out all your fabric pieces when doing it scrappy, but I think the pay off is well worth it! One of my favorite parts about a scrappy Stardust Shine quilt is that the stars seem to sparkle when you add all the subtle variations in color.

If you’ve been wanting to make a scrappy quilt, I hope this helps give you the nudge to jump on in! It’s so much fun sew together and cuddle up with when you’re done!