Lone Star Quilt ... with Half Square Triangles

A Lone Star quilt with half square triangles is a much less daunting proposition than a Lone Star quilt with diamonds, bias edges and inset seams.

It has a wee different look than a traditional Lone Star, but still makes a striking quilt without all the sewing anguish.  Inset seams still give me lots of quality time with the seam ripper.

This is the first quilt I did on the Pfaff Grandquilter.

Pebbles on the Lone Star.  I love quilted pebbles
but end up not doing them very often anymore
... they take such a long time.

As designed in EQ.

The squares and HST's are 4-inches finished and the
overall quilt dimensions are 68 x 93,
which washed and dried down to 63 x 87.

I find I usually get about 13% shrink once my quilts
get all their quilty puckery goodness.

In the Dogwood tree ... it's a nice quilt hanger
(when it's not raining).

One mo' picture, just because the tree fern
is looking so good this time of year, and I like the pic :}

New Life for My Grandmother's Orphan Lone Star Blocks

There were three Lone Stars in my Grandmother's suitcase of orphan blocks.  I saw a picture of a Lone Star table topper on Pinterest and thought it was so cute and decided to do table toppers with these three Lone Stars.  I think Yiayia would like the idea.

This is the first one completed.

It is a quiet little riot of Federal blues, reds and pinks.
And perfectly imperfect with one of the star points 'out of pattern'
and a little piece of make-do tan fabric.

The other two Lone Stars are indigo and white.
One is completed, the third one is a work in process.

I'm hand quilting the stars and finishing the edges
with a traditional knife or butt edge binding.

To try to keep the star points from getting too wonky,
the center pieces are all quilted first leaving the edge pieces
un-quilted when I do the knife edge bind.

Pippa Ross at her Welsh Quilt blog has a wonderful
tutorial on how to do a traditional knife edge binding.

http://welshquilts.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-sew-traditional-or-knife-edge.html

Once the interior pieces are quilted, excess batting and backing are trimmed away, the edges are folder under and pinned together.

It takes forever plus two and a half hours to do the trimming and pinning, repinning and repinning to get the star points just right.

I knew those little applique pins would come in handy one day.

The second star done.

With all my Grandmother's quilty things, I am always
prone to pondering whose shirt or dress did that fabric used to be?

My Grandmother's Suitcase of UFO's

When my Grandmother passed away, I became the caretaker of all her quilty things.  The saying is 'if walls could talk' ... but I wish that these quilt blocks could talk!

I have a suspicion that some of the things in this suitcase are from my Great Grandmother, and maybe even a Great Great Grandmother or two.  But the blocks aren't talking, and I'll never really know.

On the right is a set of pieced blocks, ready to be topped in the ducks feet pattern.  I'll post these another day.

Today I became focused on what lay beneath in the suitcase.

  

An assortment of indigo blocks.  Most are hand pieced.
Some are machine pieced. Some are poorly pieced.
Some are artfully pieced.

These and all the blocks in the pictures below are just one each's.

They were maybe left over from other projects
or
"I made this one and I don't want to make anymore"

An assortment of stars and star-ish blocks.

The lone star on the left is interesting ... the diamonds
are set in a way that they look like swallows in flight.
I don't think I've ever seen that before.

And an assortment of circle-ish blocks.

The large wagon wheel on the lower right has the brown paper
pattern pinned to it with a piece of fabric in another corner so I
think that it might be left over from a project.

I thought this little block was particularly interesting ... and
how difficult it would be to piece into a block.

Is it maybe intended to be appliqued?

And someone along the way had the same idea that I had
as I went through all these disparate little blocks ... to sew
them all together into a scrappy willy-nilly quilt.

I love the ocean waves blocks.
With indigo centers.

One of my fore-mother's loved indigo or wore a lot of indigo.

I'm sure somewhere among these blocks are
remnants of the clothing of a grand parent I never had the
chance to meet.

That is a wonderful part of old family quilts.
Chances are that indigo fabric was Grandma's old dress.