Quiltville’s Carolina Christmas Mystery Quilt Part 2 – My version

I’ve been plugging away at the Mystery Quilt project over at Quiltville.

As the finished quilt is now up you are able to see that it consists of two blocks, the Poinsettia Star and a Christmas Star.

As I have been following along with the mystery, when I came to step two, about halfway through I switched gears and decided to go right to the Poinsettia Star Block portion of this mystery.  I kept thinking I might be better off if I did the Poinsettia Star Block first using my 2″ finished speedy half triangle paper template.

It works perfect for this.  This is completely different than Bonnie’s technique though.  What I am doing is using 2 half square triangles instead of a rectangle with two corner squares sewn on the diagonal like Bonnie’s.  The end effect will be the same when you look at the quilt and since I can use the template…even better.

First of all, here is the template I created for this step.

speedyhalftris20

I printed 50 of these templates.  48 of these will be used for the Poinsettia Star block and the other 2 will be the pick-up remainder half square triangle blocks for the Christmas Star block.

Cut out Reds and Neutrals a little larger than an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper.  A fat quarter should yield 2.  Layer a Neutral and a Red right sides together.

Next, layer one of the templates on top of these two fabrics and pin in place.

Place under the pressure foot and stitch following the arrows.  Backstitch at the edges which get cut.  This helps to lock in a few threads so when the paper gets removed the stitches don’t come out.

Continue sewing along the dashed lines.  When you get to an edge, turn and keep on sewing.

Then, while you still have the template on the fabric, you can make a choice to stitch a couple of bonus lines.  The long straight stitching line on the right side will yield a 2.5″ strip (2″ finished width) and the short length stitching line on the bottom will yield a 2″ strip (1.5″ finished width).  Left un-stitched the 2.5″ width can be used to cut out 2.5″ neutral blocks — just an idea.

Now cut the template apart.

I used a rotary cutter to cut out the big pieces and then my scissors to cut the diagonal on the triangles.  You can use either your scissors or the rotary cutter for all of it, it’s your choice.  Both will work.

Then cut off the 1.5″ finished width strip at the bottom.

Then cut apart the HST’s.

Remove the paper, press and assemble the Poinsettia Block.

The big reason why I wanted to start with this Poinsettia Block was I can leave some of these strips aside for use in the Christmas Star Block as well as the remaining 4 red half square triangles (HST’s).  Each template yields 12 HST’s and the Poinsettia block needs 8 and the Christmas Star Block needs 4…

perfect!

We are getting a lot of snow today so it looks like I actually might get a chance to work more on this project tomorrow.  Seriously, I don’t know how Bonnie does it so fast.  I’m figuring that just the 48 Poinsettia blocks will take me about 4 weekends to finish.  We’ll see…hope they go faster.