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How to Choose Fabrics for Polaris

HollyAnne Knight

Polaris is a beautiful, traditional quilt, perfect for using scraps or showing off pretty prints. Polaris is a bright star in the night sky and a heavenly body associated with wayfinding. Let’s use the key principles of value, color, and scale to discuss ways to choose colors and fabrics to make a gorgeous traditional or scrappy Polaris quilt.

In my experience, choosing colors and fabric can be one of the most overwhelming and most rewarding parts of making a quilt. Polaris is traditionally a four color quilt, but it also lends itself to a scrappy design. Today, we’re going to discuss strategies and principles to make sure you don’t just love your fabrics but that you love the finished quilt, too!

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The strongest fabric choices combine the contrasts of value, color, and scale. For an Polaris, I generally recommend smaller prints or solid / solid-reading fabrics because the pieces are cut pretty small. Then, we can use color and value to create an eye catching effect within the stars.

Value

Value contrast is the distinct “light and dark”contrast that is often discussed in reference to using a black and white filter on your phone camera to look at your fabric choices. In Polaris, the stars are the clear focus, the background creates a surface upon which the stars “shine,” and the cornerstones create visual grounding or rest, especially if the quilt has a lot of busy or scrappy prints.

I recommend incorporating value contrast in Polaris by choosing a background color that is a lot lighter or a lot darker than your star fabrics. It creates a clear “canvas” for your sparkly stars. You might choose a single background for the whole quilt, or, for a fully scrappy effect, choose the background of each block to create value contrast with that block’s stars.

(Disclaimer: I have seen many lovely low volume and low contrast quilts. You can, of course, choose to create a low contrast Polaris if that’s what strikes your fancy as long as you keep in mind that the block shape and pattern will be much less visible.)

Color

Depending on your school-age experience with color theory, you may find this section exciting or overwhelming. In color theory terms, we could talk about choosing a color triad (such as red-blue-yellow or orange-green-purple) and choosing multiple values of each color. We could also talk about choosing a quadratic (such as violet-blue-yellow-orange) and slotting one color into each of the “spots” in the quilt. Is your head spinning yet?

If color wheels aren’t your thing, I have a simpler technique to try:

Pick two “neutrals”– whether or not these are truly neutrals as we often think of them isn’t as important as one being very light and one very dark. For the Polaris Cover Quilt above I chose white and navy. Then, choose two or three or more “sparkly” colors– I am drawn to warm colors, but they just need to “pop” off the neutral background to help your stars shine.

This also works if you want to get really scrappy with your quilt, but I’d work the other direction– gather all your star fabrics first, then choose a background and your cornerstones to make sure they’ll all “pop” next to each other.

Scale

I said at the top of this post that I generally recommend smaller prints or solid / solid-reading fabrics because the pieces are cut pretty small. Then, we can use color and value to create an eye catching effect within the stars. If choosing colors and fabrics feels overwhelming to you, then you may want to stick with this advice in order to keep this process simpler.

However, you’ll notice that I definitely disregarded my own advice with the quilt above– and it turned out AMAZING. Here’s some more in-depth thoughts if you, like me, like to use alltheprints.

(note bene: yes, I know I mis-pieced a couple of the corner stones. I didn’t spot it till it was quilted, so imperfect it will be. Oh well!)

Keep in mind that larger prints, like the big ginghams above, may cut and piece together unpredictably. As a result, the star shape in those blocks isn’t quite as visually crisp as in some of the other blocks.

Also, the parts for each star point are pieced in some funky, on the bias ways. Directional fabrics are not guaranteed to end up going the same way (note the stripes above). Like the big ginghams, I think this adds to the character to the quilt, but if that will make you a lil’ nuts, avoid directional and larger prints.

Closing Thoughts

The smaller pieces and traditional shapes of the Polaris quilt make it a perfect candidate for scrap busting or using smaller cuts of fabric (like fat quarters) to create a scrappy effect. In general, I recommend adding an extra fat quarter to the pattern’s yardage requirements if creating a scrappy effect. For example, if the pattern calls for 2 yards of fabric for Color 1, I’d pick 9 fat quarters (equivalent to 2 1/4 yards). This allows for any variance in cutting due to the smaller piece size.

If you want to create a super scrappy effect, choose as many star fabrics as the number of blocks (30 blocks? Choose 30 fabrics). Pair up fabrics, and make two identical blocks from each pair (so a 30 block quilt will have 15 different fabric combinations).

Ultimately, I hope these tools of value, color, and scale have given you some inspiration as you set out to choose your colors and fabrics for Polaris. We have kits for many of the samples shown today if one of them struck your fancy, and more resources below for shopping and busting your stash. Huzzah!

Resources