Lone Star part 1

More and more these days, lines of fabric are being made available to the quilter in small packages. It's a great way to add to one's stash because often the whole line is offered, and how often do we get to buy 20-40 different fabrics all from the same line? Depending on how the fabric is cut, the packages are called turnovers, layer cakes, and in this case, a jelly roll. Now this looks tasty!



I wanted to make a Lone Star quilt using these strips. I chose twenty-five different fabrics from Moda's Urban Couture jelly roll, based on their "busyness," relative colour intensity, and how they balanced each other set in a diamond shape. I wanted the middle of the star to have a strong centre, so red was an easy choice. I planned my strip piecing all around this.

I strip-pieced a unit using five fabrics, each 2.5 inches x width of fabric, using 1/4 inch seams, and offset by the (cut) width of a strip. I made five of these, rotating colour placement by one strip for each unit.



I carefully pressed the seams open with the hot tip of the iron. Normally seams are pressed to one side when piecing quilts, but I followed the advice in this book because it seemed to make sense to reduce bulk. The diagonal cuts were made at 45 degree angles. I got 8 diagonal strips from each 5-strip unit. The diagonal strips have bias edges that require minimal handling, for piecing success.



On my design wall, I set one diagonal strip (comprised of five diamonds) from each of the five units to make up one big diagonal point of the star (25 diamonds per). I did this eight times for each big point, and found my pleasing arrangement. That was easy, gee, couldn't it just piece itself now?



Layout done, now for piecing diagonal strips together. This process seams two bias edges over four intersections! After pin-matching the four seam crossings, I machine basted each intersection with 4-5 stitches before actually sewing the seam. This worked very well and saved stretching the edges in case I would have to pull out the stitches if the seams didn't match. I also used a walking foot normally used for machine quilting, but I thought it couldn't hurt for this kind of thing.

Ready for pinning and sewing.



Once all eight big diamond sections are pieced, cutting of the setting triangles is next. This is always quite fun since I get to work with a bigger fabric section which at this point in the process, is welcome and refreshing.



Quilt top pieced! Layer and backing still to come, but first, a break whilst I plan how the quilt design on the little diamonds. Good times!