Welcome IAQ members!

I'm a guest designer for the International Association of Quilters! If you are not familiar with the IAQ, it's an online subscription membership quilting group.  The group hosts online quilt alongs, forums, monthly guest designers and an archive of past IAQ patterns.  It's rather like an online guild. You can hop over to its website for more information.

As November's guest designer, I am pleased to welcome members of the IAQ today.  If you are here from the IAQ, welcome.  I hope you will stay and explore a little bit, get to know my quilts, and perhaps check out a few tutorials.  Also, remember to download your Night Sky Mystery block for November.

Variable Starburst block

Since the mystery quilt theme is the night sky, I felt I really should design a star block.  That's right up my alley. Perhaps being married to an astronomer has influenced me, but I love star blocks.  If you browse this blog or check out my Etsy pattern shop, you'll find just a few star themed quilts.

The block you see above is what I finally settled on.  I used light, medium and dark values of one color, but I encourage you to use this block to play with value and color placement.  Mix up the value placement.  Try different colors.  Try different textures, or maybe mixing different colours rather than multiple values of a single one.

I use EQ8 to design, and it lets me try out different options easily.  I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.  I can make major changes or just little tweaks for multiple iterations of a designs.  I love being able to consider so many options, but it can also be a huge time sink! Just one more minute for one more little tweak, just to see what happens, can turn into hours. I thought you might like a peek into that world.  Enjoy some of my EQ sketches below, showing just some of the possibilities.

First up, a layout with multiple versions of the variable starburst block. Notice how different value placement emphasizes different parts of the star.

The next few pairs of images each use just one coloring of the block, but set with sashing (left image) and without sashing (right image).

I find it fascinating to see how dark and light draw the eye to different features.  I love even more what happens when I set the blocks side by side without sashing.  It's interesting to see how secondary patterns emerge, and how even those secondary patterns have a different look based on value placement. In some of them I even feel the star becomes the secondary element as I see strings of diamonds and triangles first, or overlapping blocks on point.

Just to mix things up a bit, the quilt I designed for this month's IAQ pattern (exclusive to the IAQ for a time) didn't use these layouts at all!

Triple Sunset. Designed, pieced and quited by Joanne Kerton, Canuck Quiter Designs

I enjoyed a beautiful fall day yesterday for a Triple Sunset photo shoot.  Come back soon to see more pictures and read about where the name came from.

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