A pattern, from me to you!

Remember the star quilt that I blogged about the last few times? You know, the slightly obsessive one with the poor photography? Yes! That one. Well, this is the very simple pattern.  The finished quilt, after washing, measured 58" square. Pull up a chair and I will explain all, although I warn you, prepare yourself for some more poor photography, and even poorer explanations............

Finished quilt 58" square after washing / shrinkage.

With all of my self designed quilts, I start with very technical equipment - pencil (sharp),  A4 Pukka pad (squared) and some Staedtler fineliners in lots of groovy colours. I get them here and here. (What can I say, I still like colouring in.)  Oh, and a ruler. I'm not keen on wibbly lines.

This is how it looked when I drew out the pattern. Can you see how the blocks fit together? Have a look at the photograph of the finished quilt above and hopefully it will be clearer.

Can you see how each HST is made up? The solid blocks without a line in the middle are solid squares, there are 12 in total.

This quilt is made up of squares - half square triangles, and solid squares. The solid squares were cut 8" square, the ones that were destined to become HST's I cut at 8.5" and then after I had sewn them together and ironed the seams open, I trimmed them to 8". I used three tones on the pattern to correspond to the five different fabrics, light shades (the orange and light blue,) a medium tone (pink) and dark tones (dark green and dark blue). If you reverse the light and dark shades, you would get a completely different look to the quilt design.

White fabric : Cut 8 x 8" squares and 20 x 8.5" blocks.

Light Shade 1 (Orange on the pattern) : Cut  4  x 8" squares, and  4  x 8.5" squares. 

 STEP 1: Sew the 4  8.5" squares to 4 of the Light shade 2 squares, press open and trim to 8". You should now have 8 HSTs made up of the two light shades.

Huzzah! You don't need to do anything with the 8" blocks until you sew the whole shebang together.


Light shade 2 (Light blue on the pattern) Cut 8 x 8.5" squares.

See Step 1 above for 4 of the 8.5" squares.

STEP 2: Sew the remaining 4 of the light shade 2  8.5" squares to  4 white 8.5" squares, press seams open and trim to 8" square. You should now have 8 HST's made up of light shade 2 and white.

Medium shade ( Pink on the pattern) Cut 8 x 8.5" squares.

STEP 3: Sew all 8 medium shade 8.5" squares to 8 white  8.5" squares, press seams open and trim to 8" square. You should now have 16 HST's made up of Medium shade and white.

Dark shade 1 (Dark blue on the pattern) Cut 4 x 8.5" squares.

STEP 4: Sew 2 dark shade 1 squares to 2  dark shade 2 squares, press seams open and trim to 8" square. You should now have 4 HST's made up of dark shade 1 and dark shade 2.

STEP 5: Sew the remaining 2 dark shade 1 squares to 2 x  8.5" white squares, press seams open and trim to 8" square. You should now have 4 HST's made of dark shade 1 and white.

Dark shade 2 (Dark green on the pattern) Cut 8 x 8.5" squares.

See step 4 above for 2 of the 8.5" squares.

STEP 6:  Sew the remaining 6  8.5" dark shade 2 squares to 6 white squares, press seams open and trim to 8" You should now have 12 HST's made up of dark shade 2 and white.

Now lay your finished blocks out as in the above diagram, sew together in 8 rows and then sew each row to assemble the full top. I always pin pin pin to made sure the blocks line up. If one block is a millimetre or two out, stretching and pinning will bring it in to line and make your quilt look more accurate. 

I also added a further 2.5"edge to this quilt top, so that when I bound the quilt, it didn't cover the points of the star. I really hope that this is clear!




In terms of the specific fabrics for this quilt, I used Tula Pink's Birds and the Bees fabric, 5 different fabrics and half a yard of each was plenty. The solid white probably took a yard and a half - I always have a massive roll of white cotton in though so I'm not exactly sure!

Phew. I think I need to have a nap now!

xx