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I decided to do a mystery quilt for the first time. I think if I do another one, I’ll go with plain colored fabric, but even so I should have known my fabric choices wouldn’t work very well. The block however is interesting.
As with all mystery quilts you start out by cutting lots of fabric. I was going to do this as a throw, so I wasn’t cutting quite so much. For each block you need:
1 X 4.5” main color (red in my case)
4 X 4.5” flying geese main color outer points, background color (white here) middle point
4 X 2.5” squares, background color
4 X 4.5” hourglass squares, contrast color (blue) and background color
4 X 4.5” half square triangles main color and background color
8 X rectangles 2.5” by 4.5” of the background color
8 X 2.5” squares of the contrast color
Many of these did not start out put together, flying geese and hourglasses were put together in one class as well as the white rectangles with blue corners.
How to do flying geese and hourglasses squares are well known, so the first one I hadn’t done before was the corner triangle.
Pretty obvious though. Place the contrast color 2.5” square on top of the 2.5” X 4.5” rectangle and draw a line corner to corner as below.
Next sew a few threads to the inside of the drawn line as below:
The slight inside sewing allows for folding the fabric over and getting a very clean matching corner.
Then turn over and trim.
One key point is that you have to do left and right corners, so you have to draw the lines Left to Right and Right to Left. For one block you will need 4 lefties and 4 righties.
Now to put the square together.
Putting together the center star is pretty easy. Put a flying geese unit on each side, and then attach 2.5” background squares to each side of two flying geese units and sew top and bottom units to main square to make the star.
Next sew a left and a right corner point to a hourglass unit.
Sew two of these to the star triangle. I have not added that after you sewing each unit together you press them. That is understood in all these cases.
To the remaining two hourglass units, you add the left and right corner point pieces and then add the 4.5” HST. At this point you will have a 15.5” strip
Now sew this to top and bottom of the center star, with the side pieces added, and you end up with:
I have not done the finish pressing on the entire piece yet. While I like the block, and I like the size — 15.5”, I should have chosen different colors. I wanted red, white and blue, but the white should have been tone on tone. All of these fabrics I already had so it saved me a bit of money, but maybe false economy.
If anyone knows what this block is called, I’d be interested in knowing that.
How is your quilting going? What are you working on?
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