Carpenter's Star Christmas Quilt Part 1

If there's one thing I've learned from my overdue blogging, it's that I forget the details from my crafts and recipes.  Trying to avoid that, I'm going to start detailing some of the exciting specifics as I begin piecing together my newest quilt!  It's a gorgeous carpenter's star I first saw on this quilt on Pinterest.  I figured out my own pattern from that (sadly, the link only showed the final quilting- not the pattern), and I made a quilt for my mother-in-law last Christmas.  A couple more baby quilts later, I wanted to revive the carpenter's star pattern for a red and white Christmas quilt for my family.  I am well aware that it is still summer, but I like having plenty of time to poke around and work on a quilt.  I made the one for my mother-in-law in a breakneck 6 weeks last winter and I have no need to repeat that frenzy.

So, those details I mentioned:

Pattern:

Fabric (for twin size quilt)

[Note: will result in plenty of extra fabric (~1/3 yard per color), which I count as a good thing for inevitable bad cuts, poor calculation (cough cough), stains, loved ones running off with bits of fabric, or other quilting- or life-related issues.)

• 4 yards white fabric
• 4 yards red fabric
• 1/2 yard binding fabric
• 4 1/2 yards backing fabric
• Twin quilt batting- high loft
• Red thread
• White thread

For the quilt top, I ended up getting 4 different patterns of red fabric (1 yard each), 3 patterns of white fabric (1 yard each), and 1 pattern with holly leaves- a mix of red, white, and green, as an accent stand in for some white parts of the star (1 yard).  I got a different red for the binding, and am using one of my red quilt top patterns for the backing (so for that pattern, I got 5 1/2 yards of fabric total).  With a 20% off coupon, the supplies all cost ~$80 I think.

Squares and Half-Square Triangles (HSTs)

• For each color, cut 12 squares and 24 HSTs
• Squares measure 5 1/2" square
• HSTs cut from 5 7/8" squares; end triangle measurement is 5 7/8 x 5 7/8 x 8 1/4; HSTs sewn together will measure 5 1/2" square, the same as your regular squares

I definitely needed to capture these measurements because I did NOT remember my sizes from the last star quilt.  I tried looking up some handy dandy charts online, and unfortunately the one I followed was off, perhaps because I wasn't cutting my HSTs the same way they were.  There are a lot of great tricks to save you time, but they require you to have multiple triangle pairs of the same two fabrics, which is not the case in my quilt.  What I did was cut each larger square, and cut it in half to get 2 triangles.  That likely threw off my end measurements to be bigger than the blossom heart quilts table.  Live and learn, right?  I had a lot of excess fabric so I cut new squares (now 5 1/2" square) to match my larger assembled HST squares.

After hours of cutting and laying out the pieces in the pattern, here's where I wound up:

As you can see, my designated spot in the living room was too small, so I had to lay out portions on the couch.  That's ok.  :)  You can see the few spots where I swapped out an all-white portion for the holly pattern.  I originally had the holly scattered throughout the white parts and it was too distracting, so I consolidated into designated groups and was much happier.

I currently have 4 or 5 rows sewn together, so I'm about 1/4 of the way through the quilt top rows.  Onward and upward!

Broken Herringbone Quilt: Work in Progress Part 5 (Final Part!)

For the FINAL installment in my Broken Herringbone Quilt series, we pick up where we left off in Part 4, and move on with the actual quilting and binding for this amazing quilt.

First, lay the quilt top on the batting.  Leave a good size excess past the quilt top in each direction (in this case, 2-3").  Trim excess past that.

Trimmed to make it manageable to work with but still leave extra.  As I quilt from the center outward, the quilt top will expand a bit so I need to know I'll have batting to quilt onto by the time I reach the edges.

Flip the quilt top and batting over and lay down the backing fabric.  For this quilt I just wanted a crisp white back.  I had to cut two pieces of fabric and sew them together to get the right length/width for my lap quilt.  The yardage just wasn't wide enough on its own straight from the bolt, and this is pretty common.
Fold the fabric in half over itself and spray the batting with spray adhesive. Carefully lay the backing fabric onto the sprayed portion of the batting, and repeat for the other side.  Flip the quilt over gently and spray the quilt top into place as well.

I didn't use adhesive on my first quilt and I can say it did make a difference while it retained its stick.  I took weeks to quilt this bad boy, though, so by the end the adhesive had worn off.  Maybe it's because I used this tacky spray instead of one specifically made for quilting.

Sprayed and smoothed out.  Now we pin!

It helps a lot to use these curved safety pins that reach down into the layers and then come back up so smoothly, rather than a straight safety pin.

I pinned in most of my herringbone rectangles, but I ran out of safety pins.  This proved troublesome later so I recommend you invest in a mountain of safety pins so you can pin each square/rectangle in your pattern.  You don't want things stretching out of place as you quilt.

Make sure your pins go all the way through the layers, too!  I'd periodically flip the quilt to make sure I saw them peeking through the backing fabric.

And now the quilting can commence!  I was delighted to realize I did in fact have a quilting foot that came with my sewing machine.  Especially with this pattern, the quilting foot was a LIFESAVER.  You can go in any direction without having to constantly stop, move the back button, restart, etc.

Laying out the quilt and starting in the middle of the quilt.  All the tutorials I read stressed how important that is.  So starting in the middle, I began tracing the white lines in my herringbone pattern.  I want that blank white back of the quilt to show the herringbone pattern clearly!

I've also learned to roll the excess quilt that I've already sewn or haven't yet sewn into this neat bundle under the sewing machine.  Just keep rolling/unrolling as you work and it makes that volume of fabric more manageable.

A little sneak peak of how tracing the herringbone pattern on the quilt top translates on the back of the quilt.

Quilting done!  Ermahgerd!  Time to trim the leftover batting, which you can see was pretty much what I started with.  Hmm.  Not sure if the stretching that takes place while quilting is as dramatic as I thought it was, but oh well.  Not a bother at all. :)

This point is so deceptive.  It's super exciting because it's SO CLOSE to done, but binding is no small feat.  Sigh.  Onward march.

I'm binding the fabric in navy blue, and I've already cut 5 strips that are 3" wide, and as long as the width of my lap quilt (WOF).  I need to attach the pieces end-to-end perpendicularly.  So step one is to attach the ends at an angle like this and pin in place.

Then draw a straight line across the diagonal where they meet.  Stitch in navy thread to be all coordinating and feel overly proud of yourself.

Cut off the part past your seam, leaving about 1/4" past the seam.

When you unfold, the strips are now attached at a diagonal.  My strips never lined up perfectly but I guess it's no big deal as you walk through the folds and everything that takes place with binding.

Once the strips are all sewn together, it's time to fold them in half (definitely iron so the fold stays put) and pin them in place along the edge of the quilt, raw edge lining up with the raw edge of the quilt.  You'll have a lot of excess binding at the beginning and end.

Just kind of pin that excess out of the way.  You'll need to carefully sew the beginning and end to each other when you finish up.  I have no hope of explaining that process well myself, so I'll just direct you to the tutorial I used here.

Once that's done you sew along the edges (1/4" seam allowance), and fold the fabric over to the back.  Hand stitch in place.

AND THEN YOU'RE DONE!  Eeeee!  Look at that herringbone design all over the back.  Ahhh.

Close up!

The quilt is done!  Time dance around the kitchen like a crazy person.  Post to FB about 2 seconds later.

I seriously love this quilt so much.  It looks beautiful and colorful and I love the patterns.  It's a great size for my 4-year-old son to snuggle up with, or even little me for that matter.  For my tall husband it just covers his lap when he's lounging on the couch and that's fine.  Big pat on my back for this one, and a mental note to enter it in the fair next summer. ;)

Broken Herringbone Quilt: Work in Progress Part 4

For today's update, I am very excited to show you the result of piecing together all of those T blocks of fabric!  In the last update, I had most of the top half of the quilt done, but not connected.  I've been busy since then, even though I haven't been updating.  I finished all 5 columns (even the earlier columns needed more work, adding on to length to get a good lap size quilt).  Last night I finished connecting all the columns to each other to get the quilt front DONE!  I trimmed the edges, and am now ready to start basting.  And no, it's not coating my quilt in gravy.  How many times do you think that joke has been made by quilting bloggers?  Oh well.  Just like my newfound joy with the phrase "stitch the ditch," I get to make bad quilting jokes for the first time, too.

So here's how it looked along the way:

First few columns completely connected.  Wow!

I must note, though, that with the first column I did try filling in the gaps with little triangles as I mentioned in my last post.  My conclusion?  That is not the way to get nice edges to the quilt.

All those tiny scraps and sewing tiny triangles and just tiny annoying not matching up-ness all around.  Way too much of a headache.  I left that first column in place and resolved I would simply trim down the other three sides to get straight edges, rather than fuss with fill pieces.  Because I only have so many sanities in my brain and I need to keep them.

Next up: showing how to connect the columns.

All lined up next to each other to show you where they connect.

Close up!  See which pieces connect up?

Here's another way to show which pieces get connected.

And then poof- everything all sewn to each other!

Once the columns were all connected, it was time to cut off those edges.  Note my fancy Paint skills.  You wish you could draw scissors like me.  Even though I didn't actually use scissors--I used a rotary cutter.

Straight edges!  No really, they're straight...

And that's where things stand now!  I'm backing this with plain white fabric.  I'm going to quilt with zig zags, which will add interesting texture to the plain white side.  I also figured that with such a busy front, I didn't need a pattern on the back of the quilt. Nice, crisp white appealed to me.  I'll do a navy edge all around.  Stay tuned!

Broken Herringbone Quilt: Work in Progress Part 3

This quilt is coming along nicely!  I'm maybe 80% of the way done with the quilt top (all the fabric pieces).  This week's detour was when I realized that I was starting to get some redundancy in my pattern- the same combo of pieces together.  No bueno!  Some rearranging and a critical eye helped me navigate those waters successfully, and get me back on track.  Here's where things stand now:

And in fact I'm even further along than that.  All those individual scraps are sewn into their Ts at least, ready to be attached to columns 3 and 4.

Here's how things looked along the way.

First bit of columns 1 and 2 sewn; laying out the bottom half of each column.

Got the Ts sewn for columns 1 and 2- just need to attach for nice long columns of fabric!

Also starting to think out how I'm going to manage the edge of the quilt.  I think I'll just attach little triangles to fill in the gaps, but to accomplish that I'll just sew on the fabric strips and then cut the excess, rather than try to sew teeny little triangles.

And that's it for now!

Broken Herringbone Quilt: Work in Progress Part 2

Picking up where I left off from last week's quilting, I am ready to share the results of sewing all those quilting Ts together!

So far, things are going well.  I learned a couple important lessons along the way, like leaving about an inch of loose fabric at the edges so I can sew these Ts together, and creating some semblance of order in my progress.  Let's break it down.

Step 4: Sewing the Ts (basic quilt component for the broken herringbone quilt)

As I planned out in Step 3, I sewed my pieces of fabric together, in order, to create a T.  All seams are 1/4".

Here I have two Ts done and sewn together, on the left hand side.  The rest of my fabric is laid out, awaiting assembly line sewing.

So how did I attach the Ts to each other?  Let's take a look.  First, this is where I realized that I needed my fabric to have a loose edge so I could sew one T to the other.

Unfold the bottom left corner, then flip the next T upside down, so you can sew right sides together. 

All sewn together. 

Here we are on the next T down, continuing the steps. Unfold corner.

 Flip next T upside down and sew together. 

 Again, I have attached Ts.  Next, let's show sewing the vertical seam.

Flip my fabrics so right sides face each other, and sew down that vertical seam with the same 1/4" seam I've been using all along.

Flatten the existing seams down as you sew, in the same direction, so you don't get weird fabric bulges along the way.  Do this consistently throughout the quilt.  Not only is it OCD happy to have all seams going in the same direction, it creates consistent texture to your finished quilt.  See below?  I flattened the seams going up.  A couple Ts later, I realized how much easier it was to fold them down.  So down it is for the remainder of the quilt.

 All sewn together.  See now neat and tidy these seams are?

Repeat repeat repeat.  I have the starts of two vertical columns of herringbone going now.

Last night I started planning out the next couple vertical columns.  After sewing those, I'm going to start measuring out to ensure I have the full width of my quilt.  I may need another column or two.  Once the width is set, I'll start laying out the full length of the quilt.  And while I'm at it, I may see if it's easier to stitch this in rows rather than columns.  Because I'm a glutton for punishment, changing up my approach halfway through.  ;)