Stars are always popular for quilters to make blocks and quilts, and you can see a star in the background here. That one’s a fairly large star, and it’s made from diamonds.
Diamonds are a little more difficult to sew together than half square of triangles which is another way you can make a star. And so quilters have asked how sew a star using diamonds. The difficulty is in using the sudden seams. And so today I’ve decided to show the Idaho Star and make it out of diamonds and you can see that the green spaces in here are going to require sudden seams. So you’ll see exactly how to do that.
This is Penny Halgren from QuiltBlockLibrary.com and QuiltBlockLibrary.TV. Thanks for joining me and I’ve got my pieces all cut out and ready to start. So let’s go to the sewing machine.
This Idaho star block is a pointed star like I pointed out. And it’s got squares and triangles in between each one of the points. I chose my colors because Idaho’s state butterfly is the modern butterfly so I decided that orange and yellow with a little bit of black and then green for the plants would be kind of cool. So the first thing I’m going to do is sew the center part together with the star. And I’m going to sew pairs of diamonds together.
Now the one thing that’s different about sewing stars than sewing other blocks is that you want to stop especially because you got this sudden seam, you want to stop a quarter of an inch away from your ending point here and I’m going to do a little backstitching in here just to secure that seam in place.
The other thing to watch for is to sew them together putting the same color on top. The star points are all sewn together and I’ve press the seam allowances facing the orange side and now I’ve got two of these where the tips have been cut off. And so I’m just going to cut the tips off the other two sides and this helps you see exactly where you’re sewing and in addition, it relieves some of the bulk that‘s in the center of this quilt.
So the next step is to sew these two halves together. So I’m going to flip this over so that once again, I’m sewing with the yellow on top. These two halves of the star are sewn together and I’ve pressed the seam allowances, and I’m going to come in close here so you can see because what I’ve done is press the seam allowances so that they go in on a circle. And when I sew this together they’re going to just go all the way around in a circle.
The next step is to sew these together. And by pressing the seam allowances in that direction these two are going to have the seam allowances facing in opposite directions and the center of your star is going to nestle down very nicely, and your seam allowances will lay as flat as they can.
Once you’ve sewn your final seam down to the center then you’re going to want and take it over to your ironing board and again, press your seam so that they go in a circle. And what’s interesting is that before you iron this down you can open these seams, the center seam so that it has this kind of interesting little star shape, but it allows the seam allowances to be folded in opposite directions through that center seam. And so you’re going to want to press that with the steam iron. And then the thing I’m going to do is check because on some of these seams, and I think this might be one of them, it looks like my ironing folds the seam allowance a little bit inside my stitching. And so I’m going to go back and stitch in that seam allowance just so that I’m sure that when I put my sudden seams which could be a triangle or a square that I’m setting it correctly and that my star is going to lay flat.
Now that the center stars are sewn together it’s time to add these pieces, and I’m going to start with this triangle on the corner. And I’m going to put those right sides together match it up with this diamond here. And I’m going to start right here in the center and so to the outside.
Now that I’ve got this little triangle sewn on, I’m going to match these two seams and it’s going to mean that I’ll fold this back, line everything up. Put a pin in here and then I’ll be able to start stitching from where this ended down the side to the end of the diamond and the triangle.
Now I’ve got the triangles sewn in and it lays pretty flat, and what I’m going to do is press the seam allowance towards the triangle and that’s going to distribute all of these fabric and it’s going to lay relatively flat.
So the next thing to do is add the next piece and you can either do it across so you can work around and you can do it however you want to, but the idea is just to add all of the squares and the triangles using the same process for sudden seams. And once you’ve finished doing all of those then your star is finished.
Now that this block is finished I wanted to show what the back looked like and you can see that I’ve put off all a little tips here as well as clipping the tips off in the center along the way. This block is finished and it’s ready to be put into a quilt.
This is Penny Halgren from QuiltBlockLibraray.com signing off. And if you’re not already there you head on over to QuiltBlockLibrary.com and get your free download of this Idaho Star Quilt Block pattern.
Until next time, peaceful piecing.
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