Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Tempted? - Rose Star Quilt block party

Has anyone come across the Rose Star Quilt block party? I am soooo tempted to join. (Thanks to Carey for telling me about it.)


It's english paper piecing (EPP) and at first sight it looks complicated but it's not really. It actually only uses three shapes: hexagons, kites, and some 5-sided shapes that I'm going to call squashed pentagons.

Start with a 1 1/2" hexagon in the centre, add a row squashed pentagons, add a row of kites, then another row of each. The white in-between blocks are just a hexagon and three squashed pentagons. Each rose star ends up at roughly 8 inches by 8 inches. (This one by Summerfete is a mini quilt.)

Good colour-choice and fabric-choice will be absolutely essential for this quilt so I'm going to wait until inspiration strikes me. But in the meantime, I think I'm going to get some dies custom-made so that I can die-cut all the papers. (Yes, they'll end up in my store too.)

You can find Summerfete's Rose Star tutorial here and the Flickr group here.  (Looks like over 100 people have joined already.) Anyone tempted?



P.S. This quilt block somehow took me to another great tutorial on how to do EPP without stitching through your papers. There's a photo for every single step of the process. For those of you who haven't tried EPP before, you'll find the tutorial here.

4 comments:

  1. I could almost have written this coment myself- exactly the same thing happened to me - I am going to make the templates and get on with it! The ones on flickr are totally inspiring, and that mini quilt is awesome!x

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can already buy the kites and hexagons professionally made and cut from "Patchwork with Busyfingers" by Sue Daley! I am doing my version which is made entirely of kites (the squashed pentagon is actually 2 of these back to back!) and 6 kites = a centre hexagon. Have fun!

    ReplyDelete
  3. And you can buy them professionally made from me too ... as soon as I decide what size to make them in!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow ! It's fantastic. But I've been looking at the quilt and trying to work out how the colours were chosen but I can't work out how she did it. Would you choose 3 or 4 colours which you like and then get variations of those colours. Or how would YOU go about it. There must be some logical way of doing it so that you don't end up with a horrible mish-mash !

    ReplyDelete