Scraps and Second Chances

July tends to come with a very specific palette: red, white, and blue. I don’t usually lean hard into seasonal themes, but red, white, and blue is such a great combo to work with—on my own terms. Starflower is what happens when you take the bones of a traditional patriotic quilt and run them through a filter of scraps, batiks, and a good bit of stubborn improvisation.

I’d been sewing with solids for a stretch and was craving the controlled chaos that comes with batiks—fabrics that glow and resist and surprise you as they shift in the light. I challenged myself to pull everything from my resource center, which meant making do with what I had. My red stash was particularly depleted, so I leaned into anything remotely red-ish. It’s one of the little joys of scrap quilting: fabrics that don’t feel quite right on their own can blend beautifully in the larger mix. Paired with blues, even the iffy reds started to read clearly.

The original design looked nothing like this. It started off chunkier and more linear, under the working title Pathways Home—until I realized that version just wasn’t working. I scrapped it (with a bit of dramatic sighing), went back to the drawing board, and started shifting the placement of the white sections. Once that corner piece settled in and started to look like a flower, the design clicked. The blocks themselves are very forgiving, with no matching seams, and they behave a bit like HSTs or log cabins when it comes to layout—meaning you can rotate and rearrange them into radiating patterns, zig zags, or anything else your design wall throws back at you.

I went with a radiating layout for the sample quilt. It felt bold and celebratory in a way that fit the mood of the month, but I was genuinely torn—the zig zag variation was a very close second and I’ve included both in the pattern. Each comes with its own size diagrams and coloring pages for easy planning (or playful scribbling, depending on your style).

For quilting, I used two variegated threads from Superior Threads: one red, one blue. The white flowers were left unquilted, and they pop just enough to feel dimensional against the flame-like quilting in the color sections. The quilt came together quickly, but I always take my time hand stitching down the binding. I measure my progress by corners.

It’s not a flag quilt, but it is a July quilt—and it’s a little thank you for letting me live and work in this country that I now call home. It’s bright, it’s a little wild, and it feels like a good fit for Quilt 28 of the 100 Quilt Project.

Gracie was her usual quiet presence throughout the making of this quilt. She’s not much for supervising, but she’s always nearby—dozing on her bed, stretching into sunny patches, or thumping her tail when I shift my chair (are you moving to get cookies?). She perks up considerably during the photography session (cookies are involved, of course). She may not care about batik placement, but she knows when something important is happening. And to be clear here, the important thing is not the quilt but the cookies.