Quarantine Quilt Challenge Week 5
Good morning! Today I get to share one of my favorite paper-piecing blocks. Say hello to A Triple Star. If you have never paper pieced before, you can get the paper-piecing directions from Quilter’s Cache or YouTube.
Paper piecing is an incredibly useful technique for creating shapes that you wouldn’t normally achieve with traditional piecing. I encourage you to try this technique if you haven’t done it before.
As mentioned in the introductory post, there is an alternate block if paper-piecing isn’t your cup of tea. Scroll down for the sewing & cutting directions for Go Along Star.
If you are new to the Quarantine Quilt Along, you can find the previous week’s information in the links below:
NOTES:
Start with more fabric than you think you need. The one downside to PP is that there is a lot of waste during the learning curve, BUT your crumb pile will grow.
If you haven’t PP’d in the past, this will teach you to think in reverse.
Also, use the lightest weight paper you have. I have used newsprint sheets, cheap printer paper, and vellum. They all work well. For this project, I just used regular printer paper that I already had in my machine. It’s stiffer, but with a shortened stitch, tears just fine.
Once you have the technique learned, you can shorten your stitch length to make tearing the papers easier. I shouldn’t have in the early learning phase, because the tighter stitches made frogging my mistakes a nightmare.
Best Press and/or Flatter are your friends with this technique. It presses those seams nice and flat to keep your pieces from rippling.
Use pins to hold the fabrics and paper in place to keep them from shifting.
In the beginning, when I was learning, I found that coloring in the shapes with the appropriate fabric color really helped me keep things straight. This pattern has used colored dots to the same effect.
About the templates: Each one has a 1″ test square. CHECK IT. I’ll say that again. CHECK IT. I didn’t because I had used the pattern in the past. I’m not sure what changed (different printer???) but Template C is printing significantly smaller than it should be. I didn’t find out until I went to assemble the units. I wasted fabric and time. What I ended up doing is printing two pages of Template B and then cutting the center square to fit.
To begin, I trimmed the Template A to a more manageable size then sliced them into triangles with my rotary cutter. Following the diagrams, I pieced these then trimmed to size. Because it’s been a while since I’ve PP’d, I cut my fabric much larger than necessary, but I didn’t have any problems with sizing issues when it came time to trim.
I repeated that with Template B.
A Triple Star uses Fabrics 1-3 plus scraps for the center point as well as the background.
I wanted “WOW” factor for A Triple Star. I can envision a whole quilt made in these fabrics. For this block I used Tula Pink’s Homemade line for the prints, Moda’s Loganberry Grunge for the “solid” and Riley Blake’s Triangles white tone on tone for the background.
When I’m sewing, I really get in the zone and forget to photograph the steps. The following pics are front and back of the printed strip.
Once all of the units were trimmed, it came time to assemble the block. It was at this point that I realized I had a problem with Template C. After I figured out what had gone wrong, I printed off a new Template B and made the units.
The units were laid out and assembled. They line up beautifully and you end up with a perfect 12 1/2″ unfinished block.
PART B – Alternate Block: Go Along Star
This block was created by my friend and the Texas Quilter’s Group moderator, Stephannie Brown.
Cutting is straight forward. If you are using fat quarters on the color 2 (neutral in my block) you may need to cut on the 22” side for your 4.5”x18” strip. You will be cutting this down to 4 -4.5” squares (the corners).
In other news, it’s been a busy sewing week. I have the Quarantine Quilt almost finished and ready to send off to the longarmer. I completed another Tana Mueller barn quilt block, this one was Old Timer Auto & Tractor Barn. Super, super cute! I managed to add the borders to my Lemon Meringue Pie quilt so now I’m looking for just the right applique to add to it. I also finished my Good Fortune top and yesterday I started to work on another UFO that my daughter had wanted. It’s a Laura Heine collage titled Purrfect. Junior started working on this and decided it was too much cutting for her. I hung the Pattern Ease up on my wall and laid out the background. Then I sat until midnight listening to an audiobook (Nelson DeMille’s Plum Island) while cutting out the swirls and flowers that will become the accents to the cat.
Have a very blessed week!
Melissa
Disclosure: This site uses links which lead to affiliate sites from which I make a (very) small commission. All comments and opinions are my own, and I refuse to promote a product that I do not like.
