Ode to Asheville custom quilt
A Custom Starlets Quilt in an Asheville-Inspired Rainbow
La Bizarra loves a repeat customer. Is there anything more flattering? It warms my little quilty heart. This is a customer with a great idea, too: she collects fabrics that she loves that remind her of things that make her happy. In this case, she loves exploring Asheville, NC and the surrounding mountains with her family and has collected a gorgeous variety of fabrics that remind her in some way of their times there.
This is such a brilliant idea. What a great way to imbue your quilt with personal meaning, so that it already has a story from its first moment.
And then that’s where I got to come in! She had a couple ideas of patterns she might like, but we settled on the Starlets pattern from Modernly Morgan because it uses large pieces of each fabric to really showcase the prints and spark those precious memories.
Choosing the Perfect Pattern: Starlets shines
The customer originally thought they would go with a Cozy Cabin quilt to evoke the home-away-from-home feel. The Cozy Cabin quilt pattern by Modernly Morgan is a great, versatile pattern that I wrote about in detail in this post where I tested the pattern for her. I have made it several times, and it looks great in every fabric combination you throw at it. It looked great in these fabrics, too.
But you can see that while the fabric prints really shine in the stars, they get a little lost in the strips of the log cabin. The colors bounce off each other delightfully, but the larger scale prints are no longer recognizable. Because each fabric was so carefully selected as part of the story of this quilt, we really needed a pattern that would let them speak.
So I suggested the Starlets quilt pattern, another pattern that I originally tested for Morgan with a similar sparkle but with much larger pieces of each fabric, so the beautiful prints don’t get cut up as much, and are instead featured like a gallery wall of textile art.
Even after settling on the perfect quilt pattern, you can see there were still a lot of decisions to make. Random color placement or arranged in color order? Dark stars, light stars, a gradient of stars? Neutral stars or colorful? I love seeing the evolution of the design like this. A real peek behind the curtain of the custom quilt process.
A Mountain Rainbow Color Story
The most special and important aspect of this quilt was the fabric selection. And for once, I contributed very minimally to it! Each piece was handpicked by the client for significance to them and their family in some way, primarily to remind them of their travels to one of their favorite destinations, Asheville, North Carolina. Asheville is a small, stylish city in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with a vibrant art scene, indie boutiques, the Historic Biltmore estate, and quite a lot of activity to draw tourists and visitors.
The fabrics had an effortlessly eclectic feel, with a wide variety of prints and soft textures that worked beautifully together. There was a real sense of curation in the stack. Not just pretty colors, but fabrics with a story. I would definitely characterize it as eclectic or boho aesthetic. Bold florals in vibrant colors, swiss dots in pastels, whimsical golden teapots and delicate feathers all worked together as a team, rather than competing with one another.
The palette came together as a gentle pastel rainbow with pops of deeper hues: juicy peach and apricot, leafy greens with a burst of emerald, soft buttery yellows, and every sky blue from clear to cloudy to night sky navy. These weren't my typical saturated rainbow brights; instead, they evoked a quiet mountain sunrise or the vintage wallpaper of a Victorian bed and breakfast.
I separated out the lightest low volume prints to use for the mini starlets. I love the way that it makes the whole quilt sparkle and makes the colorful feature fabrics stand out even more.
Sewing and Construction: Watercolor painting with fabric
The Starlets quilt pattern has a lot of small pieces and this was a large, queen-sized quilt, so an awful lot of stitches went into this beauty. Luckily they provided plenty of fabric; people often underestimate how much fabric goes into a quilt this size.
It was also nice to have a variety of prints in each color family, so that I could distribute the fabrics across the quilt, and not have adjacent fabrics touching. This gave it a nice gradient effect, and kept the whole composition really balanced.
Because we decided to use rainbow color order to arrange the blocks, this meant careful planning on the design wall. The design wall didn’t quite fit all the blocks, so I just taped them to the wall where I needed to until I could start sewing it all together. It was so fun to watch it come together.
Custom Quilting Details and Finishing Touches
I worked with my longarm quilter, Meghan at A Piece of Quiet Quilts, to choose a quilting design and thread color that I knew this client would love. We went with a classic wishbone, a timeless design that adds just the right amount of texture without distracting from the star blocks. The stitching was done in a golden thread that glowed subtly across the pastel fabrics, tying everything together with a warm shimmer that complemented every color used on the top.
On the back, they chose a deep navy sateen Speckled fabric with metallic accents, adding a luxurious contrast to the soft colors on the front. The combination of metallic gold, sateen sheen, and the texture of a classic motif really elevated the quilt and made it feel like it had a patina, like a treasured antique.
She’s a stunner, for sure. I really enjoyed this process and I hope the client did, too.
Just for fun, I will show you the final digital mockup I created for client approval, alongside the glamour shots of the finished quilt. Pretty close, right? These digital versions are just to help people visualize what I am picturing, to make sure we are on the same page. They aren’t really intended to be replicas. But they do tend to look pretty similar in the end.
A Meaningful, Heirloom Quilt of Travel Memories
This quilt is more than just a blanket, it’s a tangible memory, a story you can wrap yourself in.
It’s always an honor to work on custom projects like this one, where meaning and design come together so well. From the Asheville-sourced fabrics to the classic quilting and rich backing, every detail was chosen with care. Now finished, this travel-inspired rainbow quilt will continue its journey as a fully realized heirloom, soaking up new memories and an entirely new history of its own.
Special note: This quilt was completed about five months before the historic Hurricane Helene rolled through Asheville and the surrounding cities and areas in western North Carolina (and many other states, obviously) leaving a trail a destruction and chaos. It has been weeks, as of writing, and so many residents are still without power and running water. It will take years to rebuild this vibrant community. I hope you will consider donating to one of the many mutual aid organizations on the ground in Asheville. I will suggest Beloved Asheville as only one of so many organizations that are helping to meet the most urgent needs of this community.
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