Last fall when I was in UT sewing with some friends, I picked up a project (pattern isn't the right word) for a folded star hot-pad at a local quilt shop. The "pattern" is made by "Plum Easy" patterns and can be ordered from Amazon if you're interested.

It took me until now to actually cut up some fabric squares, iron them in to Prairie Points, and sew them down to the interfacing/template.  But when I did, I thought it was kind of fun. You can see the first folded star project I did on my Instagram account. 

Once I had done one, I wanted to do more!

At the same time I bought the project for the hot pad, I also purchased a plastic template for folded stars. I figured that the template would be the same as the pre-marked piece of interfacing. But I was wrong. The interfacing comes marked to make a star with 4 different layers of fabric, but the template only lets you do three layers. I'm sure that there's a way to add more markings to the template, but I wasn't in the mood to do math. So the template got filed away and I ordered more of the pre-marked pieces of interfacing.

Once I had more interfacing templates, I made three more stars and sewed them together to make a mini-quilt of sorts. Maybe a table runner?

It's always fun to try something new, and even better if it's clever. I love learning how things go together and this project was unlike anything I'd ever made.  Now I'm going to pack this guy away for a few months and look forward to seeing it again in December. 

Quilt Stats:
The blocks are each 8 inches finished, so this guy is just under 23 inches long and 8 inches wide. I did use batting and quilted just right around each outer star.

Thanks for stopping by!

This year I've been on a mission to tame both my scrap bins and my fabric stash. Over the holidays I spent a lot of time cutting the fabric in my scrap bins in to 2 1/2" and 3 1/2" squares. When that was done I had piles and piles of fabric squares and wanted to use them.  So I drafted the pattern below using the double bear paw block (a take on the traditional bear paw block), and got to work. I talk a little bit about all of my fabric squares here.

I backed the quilt in a piece of "wide back" Sketch fabric by Carolyn Friedlander. This was my first time using wide-back (108") fabric and it was awesome not to have to piece my backing together. The only down-side was in-spite of pre-washing the fabric, the blue backing bled on my gloves as I quilted it, and scared me that it was going to bleed on all the low-volume sections of my quilt.

I quilted this big-guy on my home machine and did simple echo quilting down the sashing between the blocks, and then diagonally thru each bear paw, and bound the quilt with Michael Miller's black and white "Clown Stripe" fabric.

Quilt Stats

This quilt is a big one!
It ends up at 86" square and is made of 1,849 squares. Do you want to know the sad part? I still have soooo many squares of scrap fabric left over. So many.

I created a tutorial on how to create the double bear paw-blocks and that can be found here.