Woven Star block tutorial

Woven Star Block

12” block (finished)

Materials:

Background fabric: four 4.5 inch squares & eight 2.5 inch squares

Star fabric: four pieces 2.5 x 4.5 and four pieces 2.5 x 6.6 inches

You can use all the same fabric for the stars, but would lose the woven effect. You still get it with just two fabrics, or go scrappy and use a different fabric for each piece (like I did)

Draw a line on the diagonal of the 2.5 inch squares.

Lay out the eight 2.5 inch strips (4.5 and 6.5 inches long), right sides up. On the longer strips place the square with the drawn line going from the top left corner to the right lower corner. On the shorter strips, place the square with the drawn line going from the top right corner to the left lower corner:

 

Stitch on the drawn lines and trim off the corners:

Now, lay your background squares and the star points out in the way you want them to look:

You do this because you want to press differently for each “small block”.  For points on block #’s 1 & 3, press seams towards the triangle. On blocks 2 & 4, press towards the strip. This allows for nesting of seams when sewing them all together and reduces bulk in the seams.

The picture below shows the pressing on block 3 (right) and block 4 (left):

Sew the smaller strips to the background squares:

Press seams towards the star points. Go back to your layout with them to match up your long points. I do it this way so I don’t mix my little blocks up:

Then you sew the long star points to the block and press seams to the star points again:

Lay the little blocks out one more time…

Sew them together in pairs, pressing the seams in opposite directions so they will nest in the center when you sew the two pairs together: And you’re done!

This is such a pretty block and so easy to make. They look equally good laid out in straight rows or on point. Here is a lap quilt I made for my sister with the blocks on point:

 

Here is another I just recently finished. The blocks are smaller - I shrunk them down to 8 inches and lined them up around the outside. This top has already won three 1st place ribbons in local fair competitions:

 

 

Well, it seems that I'm not doing something right. I created "pages". One is Home and one is Tutorials and another is Patterns.  I thought I posted this block tutorial under Tutorials. Nope, it's a blog post and ended up on the "Home" page.
So until I can figure out what I'm doing, those pages are now hid and instead of a blog entry you get a tutorial for a block pattern. Enjoy!