Aurora Star Revisit: Colour Inspiration Tuesday and Link Party

Today I have for you a recycled idea and a brand new quilt!

For September, the theme for the Island Batik Ambassador projects is “Starstruck”. This theme immediately and happily put me in mind of a quilt design I conceived for Colour Inspiration Tuesday last November. Finally, I had a reason to put “Aurora Star” at the top of the ideas-to-play-with priority queue. Then, noticing that it’s now Bloggers’ Quilt Festival Week,  I found the extra motivation I needed to get a quilt finish on the table asap. Literally. Ha! There’s a filthy big clue to what I’ve made this week.  🙂

Recording and revisiting quilt ideas is important…..

Don’t you think? I do – it’s a huge part of my quilt making process. And part of the reason why I run Colour Inspiration Tuesdays. To show you my process and to get both you and myself thinking about quilt possibilities before either of us faces the pressure of needing a new design, pronto! I have always found the best way to kill creativity is to demand it on tap.

I know that only a fraction of my Colour Inspiration Tuesday ideas will ever get to be quilts.  And I’m ok with that. But last November I ended up with a quilt design I instinctively knew would be the exception rather than the rule. Every time I revisited this idea, I really wanted to make it. It is a design I called Aurora Star and it came out of a musing over the possibility of seeing Venus (the Morning and Evening Star) superimposed over the Northern Lights. 

Aurora season

There were a couple of things that made me remember to revisit my Aurora Star design after all this time. The main one was being given these fabrics to use in my role as an Island Batik Ambassador.

Somehow this collection reminded me of auroras – probably a combination of the colours and the mottled fabric in the middle called Mardigras. And of course, knowing I needed a star-themed project was a suggestive sell too.

I decided that the blue-purple (Blurple) fabric would suffice as my background colour. I added a few other Island Batik scraps from other projects to the pile to fill out my envisaged colour palette.  I would have loved one or two medium grass-greens to add to the mix, but I didn’t have any. I also didn’t have enough Blurple fabric to do a full-sized quilt. But that’s ok, I was happy to try out this design in a table runner format first up. 

The making of my Aurora Star table runner

I set aside most of the Mardigras mottled fabric to use as the backing of my table runner. Then I made  five scrappy blocks with Blurple fabric stars in the centre. And one with a white star.

Then I sliced my blocks up and sewed them together in this format:

I finished this little quilt by bagging it out (also known as a pillowcase finish). This meant that a binding was not required and my little piece of colourful evening sky floats on my table. It has a scrap of cotton batting on the inside.

I quilted the blue-purple stars quite densely with a variegated blue and purple 50wt cotton thread from Wonderfil called .Tutti colour TU20. This made the wiggly aurora sections pop forward nicely. I also quilted the white star, but less densely, with a metallic blue thread from Gütermann (Metallic Effect W 331 Thread colour #143).

A stamp of approval

Because this quilt is for the table, Mew the cat did not get to inspect it. However, my milk and sugar cows thought it was just the thing to rest on a soft aurora after a hard night’s moon-jumping.

They’d love to have you over for a cuppa, but you’ll need to bring your own spoon.  I’m told it ran off with a dish….. 🙂

So that is my Colour Inspiration Tuesday for this week, and also my September project featuring Island Batik.

And because my quilt finish falls within the Bloggers’ Quilt Festival hosted at Amy’s Creative Side, I am linking it up to her event too. Make sure you visit her post to see lots of newly-blogged quilt finishes. And if you quilt-blog, write up your latest finish and join us at Amy’s for a chance to win some great prizes. Good luck!

Now onto this Week’s Reader Quilt feature 

This week’s Colour Inspiration Tuesday idea is both recycled and upgraded. So it’s only fair that this week’s reader feature is too! This weeks quilt is one we first saw here back in June, from Brenda at Songbird Designs. Brenda placed her Wonderland quilt into her local County Fair and was awarded her first blue ribbon! Join me on congratulating Brenda on a job very well done!

My sincerest thanks to everyone who linked up last week. If you were featured you can find a badge of honour here.

Link up to the Chameleon’s  Linky Party and show us your projects

What are you working on, or have recently finished in your sewing room? Link up a blog post, a Flicker pic, an IG post or simply a photo from your computer.  See if you can hit the bullseye and get the Chameleon to turn quilted with happiness. We’d love to see your quilting colours.

Guidelines (more detail here):

• Link up your latest or recent quilt excitement. All construction stages welcome – even fabric pulls!
• You have 100 characters in the link description…. tell us who you are and what your fantastic project is.
• URLs are not necessary to link up…. non-bloggers 100% welcome! If you don’t have a URL, simply link up with just a photo. 
• Do it now……. before you forget!

[inlinkz_linkup id=798305 mode=1]

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Would you like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I design as well as find all over the internet? You can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Don’t forget to link up all your current quilting projects on Tuesdays at our Colour Inspiration Linky parties! And if you’d like to road test my newest patterns, I am always on the hunt for keen pattern testers.

The Chameleon turns rainbow with pleasure when he hears from you. I am more reserved, so I will respond in gratitude by email instead. Now that it’s your turn…. Scroll right to the end, leave me a comment and tell me, what do you think? Thanks for connecting!