2025 Happy New Year disco ball quilt
Disco Stars Quilt pattern test: playful pop art
Happy New Year 2025, lovers of bizarre and delightful objets d’art!
Nothing says New Year’s party like a disco ball, so I thought I’d make a quick post about the Disco Stars quilt I made in October to test Modernly Morgan’s Disco Stars quilt pattern. This pattern is so beautiful that it is definitely worth the intensity of hours spent sewing tiny 9-patch blocks together. The results speak for themselves. That is a cozy party right there.
I really wanted to capture the reflective tiles of a mirror ball here and was inspired by the disco ball paintings of Alice Masters. Seriously check her out, I have not managed to purchase one of her paintings yet because they are in incredibly high demand, but it is on my list for sure. Mind-blowing.
This pattern embraces a fun postmodern pop art aesthetic, which is right up my alley, and I had so many ideas for making it shine. Let’s dive in.
Here were my two mock-ups:
Bold modern textiles with retro flair
I was committed to the black starry background, from designer Alexia Abegg. Starry is a staple of Ruby Star Society’s fabric collections. I was also committed to the dusk starry secondary color right off the bat, and then I was mostly using images of the new 2024 colors of Speckled fabric from Ruby Star Society designer Rashida Coleman-Hale to plan my disco balls.
I really wanted to use that grassy green and the chartreuse color (my very favorite color!), but alas, it didn’t work for me. I’m happy I went with the cooler, bluer color palette. The lavender warms it up a little and then the neon print from Rashida Coleman-Hale’s Adorn collection gives it the little reflective sparkle it needed. Let’s groove!
I loved creating those playful, pixelated disco balls—such a symbol of energetic dance and expression—out of cool serene colors with minimal and basic prints. It really lets the disco balls bring the funk and lets the neon sparkle, without anything else distracting your eye.
If I have any wisdom to impart from the mistakes I made, it’s to consider your contrast. While I love the final impact of the quilt, I had to eliminate some of my 9-patches because they were too dark to stand out well against the black background. I learned as I went, and paired the darkest fabrics with brighter and lighter ones to avoid the shadowed effect.
handcrafted with care: the Process details
Like I said, this was a time-intensive pattern because of those little 9-patch blocks, but the resulting mirrorball effect is so worth it. You’ll also notice from these process pics that I added a lot more variety of prints to my original speckled fabrics.
All still in shades of cool blue and gray, with some navy and aqua and turquoise thrown in. There’s more starry fabrics, some Add it Up, some Spark and a couple wavy line prints. All from Ruby Star Society. I like to keep a cohesive look by sticking to the same fabric manufacturer, and Ruby Star Society is just my very favorite.
You can save yourself a lot of time sewing this pattern if you avoid directional fabrics, and set yourself up for chain-piecing in whatever way works best for you. I like to lay out my blocks beforehand, stacking the pieces on top of each other. Even with careful organizing, however, a piece or a block component will sometimes get turned or a stack will get out of order, and trust me, when that happens it’s so much easier to just rotate things around and keep going, rather than hauling out the seam ripper or re-stitching. None of my fabrics were directional (except arguably the wavy lines), so I could rotate and turn things, no problem.
Pop Art Vibes and Postmodern style: quilty deep dive
We might all know by now, but I am powerfully drawn to pop art, the bright palettes, the playful vibes, the very concept. And one of the things I love about this quilt is how deeply rooted it feels in pop art — even if it’s made of fabric instead of paint or inks. Pop art was all about repetition, bold color and contrast, and taking everyday imagery and turning it into something graphic and iconic. That’s what I love about it, really, it’s art that feels accessible, subversive and FUN. I just want to have fun, but still feel intellectual and cultured about it.
“Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything. ”
Here, the everyday image is a stylized disco ball (I WISH I saw disco balls every day). But it’s not round and reflective, it’s pixelated and glowing with color. The repetition of the block gives it that mechanical, mass-produced look that’s so central to pop art, but handmade and huggable in this case.
Now I also love to describe my design style as postmodern. These feel like related styles to me. Postmodernism loves irony, and throwbacks, and kitsch. It’s maybe a little surreal, maybe a little chaotic…just a little bit country and a little bit rock n roll.
This quilt takes some graphic, mass-produced repetition, and adds some free-spirited disco and a layer of bamboo batting! A wink and a tongue in the cheek. It’s cozy AND conceptual (which would make a great new tagline for La Bizarra Quilts).
quilt aesthetic: bold, graphic, FUN
And now for the final product! I had to speed up my quilting for the pattern release date so I went with some simple arches in a cool blue/violet thread to match the secondary star color, “dusk”. I used my sit-down long arm quilting machine, a Handiquilter Sweet Sixteen, and this was a very meditative free motion motif.
I love the way it turned out. Makes me want to dance!
Maybe you can tell from that bright blue bookshelf (yes, it’s really that blue!) and that melting disco ball figure that this quilt is an illustration of my OWN design aesthetic. I love COLOR, the more vivid, the better. I love FUN, playful and silly. I want to be surrounded by art and decor that makes me smile or surprises me. Some people call it ‘Dopamine Decor’. Or maybe eclectic style. I call it pop art and postmodern style. This quilt definitely feels at home in that environment, whatever you might call it.
Pattern review: final thoughts
If pop art is your vibe, you love bold modern pixelated quilts, or you love all things retro, the Disco Stars quilt pattern is for you. Set aside a lot of time to piece those lovely little squares, of course. Maybe grab an audiobook copy of Turn the Beat Around or Love Saves the Day, and get lost in the process. Check out Morgan’s samples of this quilt too, to see what a difference your fabric choices can make.
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