Welcome to my Sawtooth Starshine tutorial series! I am going to break down each step of making this quilt to give you all my tips and tricks. You will need your own copy of the pattern for all these tutorials to make sense, so grab your copy now and let’s get started!

The first step in starting a new quilt is picking out what fabric you will use. Fabric selection is one of the many ways you can make the design your own. The design can look very different depending on where lighter and darker fabrics are placed. I’m still always blown away by how quilters take my patterns and make them their own using their own style of fabric and color combinations!

You will use 4 different fabrics in this quilt. I love using solids, but you can absolutely use printed fabric in your Sawtooth Starshine quilt. I like to choose a range of values meaning one darker fabric, one lighter fabric, and two medium valued fabrics. I will often make mock ups of quilt designs in black, white, and gray to see how value can make certain shapes within the design stand out or blend in. As you can see in the mock ups below, the design changes so much depending on where the darker and lighter values are placed.

For this design, I prefer the top two mock ups where the highest contrast is between the bigger star and smaller star and there is less contrast between the repeated stars and background. I used this inspiration to choose my cover version of the Sawtooth Starshine quilt as well as the version I’m making for this tutorials.

Along with value, you will want to consider colors that work well together and give the quilt the look and asthenic you are wanting. This is also a great quilt to make using monochromatic fabrics, which means tones of the same color. For instance, you could make an all blue quilt using light blues, medium blues, and a dark blue.

I will often see a printed fabric that I like and then use the colors in the print to choose solids for a quilt top. So if I saw a floral fabric that had light green, pink, purple, and dark red, for instance, I could replace the lighter valued fabric in my black and white mock up with the light green, the medium/gray valued fabric with the pink and purple, and then the dark value with the dark red. There are so many ways to find colors that you like and that work well together!

MAKING MOCK UPS ON QUILTINK

My favorite tool for trying out colors and fabrics in quilt designs is QuiltInk. My Sawtooth Starshine pattern is available to “color” on QuiltInk and you can even download the fabric requirements for each fabric from your mock up! Watch the video above for Sawtooth Starshine inspiration.

Click this link to make your own Sawtooth Starshine mock up!

This is what my download page looks like for the version I’m making for this tutorial! I love these colors and I am so excited to make this quilt. Once you decide on fabrics, it’s time to purchase those fabrics and start cutting out pieces! There are many online shops that sell the fabric lines used on QuiltInk. I will also search on Etsy to find the yardage that I need.

Be sure to download my free fabric organizer that goes with this pattern to stay organized as you work through the pattern:

I hope this helps you choose what fabrics you want to use to make your Sawtooth Starshine Quilt! Up next is cutting!