Stitching up the Scraps with Cathedral Stars!

Is there anything better than a beautiful quilt made with scraps & simple units?

Or anything more fun than spending the day stitching away with friends – including those newly made!

It’s been a while since I taught Cathedral Stars – but it has so MANY of my favorite units in it, and I absolutely adore new quilters who come in a bit intimidated – feeling like they should know more than they do – and they leave feeling like they have accomplished something, that they CAN do it, and it wasn’t as hard as they thought!

You can feel the soar of self esteem and the confidence to go forward with their new-found passion for patchwork and quilting.

But the best part of all?  Finding a group of folks who will take them by the hand and encourage them to continue beyond this point.

I love teaching – it is the best feeling in the world when a newbie quilter plops that ruler down onto her unit to measure and to her own amazement – “It’s the RIGHT SIZE!”

THE. BEST. EVER!

This pattern is found under the free patterns tab at the top of the blog.  Have you made one?

Strip sets become four-patches!

We cover how to get the full width of strip measurement when cutting (Line ON the fabric, not next to it on the mat!) and how to compensate for one strip that is a bit shy in width -  Pair it with one that IS the right width, and align the outside edges, letting the short one fall a bit short within the seam – but the seam will fall in the right place to maintain UNIT SIZE.  Try it if you haven’t!

We covered the spinning of 4-patch seams!

And also how important it is to feed those 4-patches through the machine with the top seam on the pairs pointing UP toward the needle (Dark square goes under the needle FIRST!) so that all of the seams on the BACK of the patches would all spin the same direction.

Then it was time for larger strips, the Essential Triangle Tool coming in to play for the quick cutting of accurate half-square triangles! 

These two simple units are the foundation for our ladder blocks – and the colors these gals brought are just going to make each quilt so uniquely their own!

Swap out the half square triangles in the Ladder blocks -

Pop in some Tri-Recs star points and you’ve got everything you need for this quilt!

And don’t forget to break for lunch!

This buffet was a thing of tasty beauty!

I spy with my little eye -

A Singer 222 Free-arm featherweight.

(Oooh so jealous!)

Such beautiful batiks!

Fabulous brights!

Oooooh….Ocean Blue!

Didn’t they do a great job?!

We had such a wonderful day!

Click to Play:

As always, our time together flew by so fast! 

If you are driving through San Luis Obispo -

You’ll see this sign!

And the mayor has declared this week as the official QUILT WEEK in San Luis Obispo!  Isn’t that so cool?

For those driving to the show, be watching for these signs to direct you:

The signs are this obvious from the freeway!

And I’ll see you there Saturday!

Today we are on to workshop number three of our 5 day workshop series – Talkin’ Turkey gets its turn and we will be full up to the gills with string piecing and gaggles of flying geese to make our blocks.

I’m already imagining all of the other colors the quilters could possibly be working with besides the red of my own quilt -

Did you get your entry in on our Quilty Box Gift-Away?  Remember that I am drawing for our winner on Sunday morning for my trip home to North Carolina.  Enter to win ON THAT POST.

Quiltville Quote of the Day –

Vintage nine patch shared by Sherry.

Embrace the creativity within! Get to it!

Happy Wednesday, everyone!