Dancing Stars Quilt Along Week 2: Cutting Fabrics

Welcome back to the Dancing Stars quilt along! This week it’s time to cut our fabrics. If you are one of those people who loves a pretty pile of freshly cut fabric, this is your week. If you’d rather skip ahead to sewing, hang in there – a little organization now will make the star blocks much easier to sew next week!

Remember, this is a quilt along, not a race. If you don’t get everything cut this week, no worries. These posts will stay up indefinitely, so you can work at whatever pace makes you happy.

Before you start cutting, make sure you know which size you are making and keep the Dancing Stars pattern close by. The fat quarter cutting diagram in the pattern is there to help you make efficient use of your fabric, so I recommend cutting one or two fabrics to start to make sure you are comfortable with how the units are cut, then layer additional fabrics on top of each other if you’d like to cut more at one time.

The biggest tip of the week is to stay organized. Keep the pieces from each fabric together, and separate the star, background and border units as you go. You can label your units if you need to.

Cutting My Americana Version made from Riley Blake Batiks

For my Americana version, I wasn’t starting with full fat quarters. I had smaller pieces of sample batiks to work with, so I divided everything into two groups first: cream batiks for the lights, and red and blue batiks for the darks. That made it much easier to keep track of what I had as I cut.

Here are all of my light cream batiks after cutting. They are fairly subtle on their own, but I love how much variety you can see when they are all together. Low-volume fabrics don’t have to match perfectly – they just need to read as the lighter side of the light/dark contrast.

And here are the reds and blues! This pile is definitely a little louder. I kept each fabric in its own stack so I could easily see the different prints and make sure I had plenty of variety.

Once everything was cut, I started loosely stacking the lights and darks together. These aren’t necessarily the final fabric pairings – I’m mostly checking contrast and keeping things corralled until it’s time to sew. The fun part of this design is that you can still play around with the combinations and block arrangement later.

The Black, White & Grey Version made from Confetti Cotton Solids

I used the same general approach when cutting my black, white and grey version. Because these fabrics are solids and several of the greys are close in value, keeping everything separated became even more important.

This is what everything looked like after cutting. I kept the block pieces together by fabric and set the border units aside so they wouldn’t get mixed in with the star blocks.

Because some of my greys were so similar, I added labels to keep track of which colors I chose.