eo-2 Star Block Assembly

The star block consists of four triangle blocks, four hour-glass blocks and a square in the center. I had made the triangle blocks when I put together the ladder blocks. So, all that is left is to cut 20 3.5" squares for the center of each block and to make the hour-glass blocks (80).

The hour-glass blocks start the same as the triangle blocks, but using the rectangles that were cut to 6" x 9". I paired medium and dark rectangles and drew the block details on the medium fabric.

I drew a rectangle (4 1/4" x 8 1/2"), bisected it to define squares, and added diagonal lines to bisect the squares. Finally, I drew in the seam guidelines. This lay-out had a great deal of fabric waste - but does have the upside of accurate block geometry. 

After generating 80 triangle blocks, I cut these blocks in half to form two right-triangles. The triangles are half dark and half medium. I then paired each triangle with a triangle of opposing alignment of the dark and medium fabric and stitched along the hypotenuse.

I trimmed each block to 3 3/8" and then assembled the star block:

In general, the blocks looked pretty good. However, I had some puckering along a lot of the seams. I think this might be a thread tension issue. I also ended up having the star points reaching the edge of the block. This means that, when the blocks are sewn into the quilt top, the points will be flat. Bummer.

This is generally the point where I have to decide if I will continue with the quilt or not. I am usually too lazy or money-conscious to start over. In this case, I also continued just to see how the colors worked out.