Anna's Stars Quilt Along - Week Four

Anna's Stars Quilt Along - Week Four

This is the week that we get to sew all those pieces into beautiful little blocks!  They are so sweet!

Starching them has given them a really nice crisp look and they feel like little pieces of cardboard .... well maybe not that crisp 😊.   Just crisp cute.

This was the perfect time for me to use my little design board that I made using this tutorial Bee In My Bonnet.  I can arrange my thirteen blocks on the design wall or the floor and then transfer one block over to the little board to carry over to the sewing machine. There are also directions for making a larger design board that will hold about six of these little blocks - very handy!

As a refresher from last week, here is the information again on sewing a scant 1/4” seam allowance.

"A scant 1/4″ seam is just a thread or two short of exactly 1/4″. And why sew with a scant 1/4″ seam? Because you need to account for the width taken up by the seam itself.”

Check out this tutorial at We All Sew for detailed instruction on the why and how to use a scant 1/4” seam allowance. After using the spray starch throughout the entire process, I did find that everything fit together quite nicely without a lot of extra tugging here and pushing there to get seams lined up.

If you didn’t get a chance last week to sew the background squares “E” to each side of 26 of the Star Point units, this is the time to do this and press your seams towards the background fabric. Using the photo below arrange your units into thirteen blocks so that the prints are spread out into a scrappy, pleasing order.

CONSTRUCTING THE BLOCK CENTER

Note:  It's a good idea to sew one block together, from start to finish.  This gives you the opportunity to check your seam allowances and determine whether any adjustments need to be made.

 

Take two of the Star Center units and place them right sides together (RST).  If you have been using the starch on these small units, you should be ok to just line up the top of the blocks and the bottom of the blocks and stitch.  If you want to make sure that you are matching the points of the background triangle points, there is nothing wrong with putting a pin in at this location and then stitch.

I found that finger pressing the seam open at this stage in the process worked fine (versus jumping up to iron each time).  Repeat this process to make 26 of these units.

Now sew one of these units to another one to create the center block (as shown below).  Pinning at the center point can also be beneficial at this point.  I didn't pin, and you can see some of my points are great 😁(yippeee!) and some are a little off .... I'm good with that but that is your call, if there is something that is not quite right for you, go ahead and unsew, pin or repin, and try again.

Once the block has been sewn, press the seams open to create this cute star on the back side.

This next step, adding the sides to the center block, is where I did use my pin (as shown below).

I did not press these seams open after sewing them - I pressed them towards the center block instead.  I chose this method because in the final step of constructing the block (adding the top and bottom star point sections), I had pressed those seams towards the background fabric.  This allowed me to "lock" those seams together - one was going one way and the other was going the other so they locked together quite nicely.  This has always worked well for me and makes pinning usually unnecessary.  If you prefer to press all seams open and use pins to match the seams, that is perfectly fine.

Give your block one final press and a spritz of starch.  Remember to be gentle with the pressing - do not tug and pull too much otherwise things will get wonky on you.  Mine are not perfect but most trimmed up to measure 6 1/2" x 6 1/2" and I was always was careful to maintain as much of the 1/4" as possible at the star tips.

Repeat this process until you have all 13 blocks constructed.

If any of your blocks are a bit short on any side put a pin along that edge so that it is a reminder to you to watch that spot when you are sewing the blocks together.

Are these not the cutest little stack of blocks?!  Just wait until we put them altogether next week into our little quilt top 😀!

Let me know if you have any questions.

'til next time,

QB