Blog Post 6 – Friendship Star
Good morning, everybody! Dafty here (@thatcraftydafty) reporting in with my monthly update on the Patchwork and Quilting variant of the My Guilty Pleasure Subscription Service.
The Patchwork and Quilting option for the My Guilty Pleasure Subscription Service is designed to have you make a block each month, and by the end of the twelfth month you will have enough blocks to make a sampler quilt.
The sixth Block of the Month is the Friendship star. I shall be making the Double Friendship Star variant included in the paper pattern.
As always, inside this month’s box I received the following:
x 4 Fat Eighths of a new Lewis & Irene collection
x 1 Fat Quarter of a background
Fully printed instructions for the Block of the Month, complete with helpful illustrations
x 1 spool of thread, in a coordinating colour
x 1 surprise! (This month it was a really tasty biscuit!)
This is a block I really love! I’ve made a few for little projects here and there featuring it and it’s a block that you really can have fun with when it comes to fabric placement. Now, let me start with a little PSA:
READ YOUR PATTERN CAREFULLY!
I’ll admit, I’m hellish for jumping right in and cutting fabric without properly checking what I need cut, as well as how many pieces of each I need. As such, I made a little mistake while cutting some of my fabric. However, it did work out in my favour for it meant I could substitute one of the prints for some of the background fabric instead.
I substituted my corner squares, which should have been the light creamy fabric with the squirrel on it, for some of the off-white background fabric that’s always included in your subscription box. I felt this worked out better because it gave a slight difference in value to the overall block. This is something to bear in mind if you make a mistake like I did, or you don’t like the way a pattern tells you to do something: the beauty of quilting is that you really can make anything your own with a little imagination.
Now, a little tip for you while making HSTs (Half Square Triangles). A lot of people have that fancy new diagonal seam tape that’s taken the market by storm, and it really does help speed up the process of making HSTs without having to mark each piece. However, I don’t have diagonal seam tape, but I do have a quarter inch presser foot with a guide – this will work just as well.
You just line up the guide on the foot with the drawn line on your piece and stitch down both sides. BOOM! Done. Takes a little longer, but I’m much more accurate with this method, plus it means I can sew a scant quarter inch if I wish to, leaving more wiggle room when it comes to squaring up your HSTs.
Next, squaring up. I will say, squaring up HSTs is something I enjoy. It can be very monotonous and tedious, but I find it very relaxing (ha!) I’m fortunate enough to have one of those fancy rulers that means I just need to line up my stitching line with the size on the ruler that I’d like my HSTs to come out to.
However, you can also achieve the same result by using your rectangular ruler. You simply line up the measurements on your ruler – in this case, 4.5 inches – on your stitching line, and trim. NOTE: make sure you’re placing the measurements ON YOUR STITCHING LINE and not the raw edge, otherwise your block will not come out the correct size.
Some people do prefer to trim their HST blocks when they’ve ironed them open, I prefer to do it this way – it’s totally a question of preference.
Fabric placement is something worth noting for a pattern like this, especially if it’s directional fabric. Now ordinarily this isn’t something I dwell on too much, but I wanted to make sure for this that the squirrels and hedgehogs featured in one of the prints were all facing the “correct” way. So, take a moment to swap blocks around and see where you’d like them to lie. You can even do this before you make your HST units, just make sure you’re drawing your diagonal lines the right way.
The same procedure and care can be taken when adding the corner units to our HSTs, but this can be a little trickier to get things facing the same way as the other units. So, I tend not to worry too much if things are a little wonky or “upside down”.
Simply sew your block like a giant nine patch and that’s it, you’re done! The beauty of a block like this also is that you don’t have any tricky seams to match, just your intersections. If you’ve followed my previous blog entries, you’ll know I’m a fan of pressing seams to one side. I did the same for this block and there wasn’t a problem with bulky intersections, so press whichever way you like to.
As always, I hope you’ve found this helpful. I’ll be providing updates every month via the Little Miss Sew ‘n’ Sew blogs on their website, but you can check out any little sewing updates via my Instagram account: @thatcraftydafty. Hope to see you there.
Have an awesome day and happy sewing!
H.