A Bee Block Is Born...

When Susan said she wanted stars for her month in Brit Bee, I went straight to my pin board, 'Things To Make - Quilt Blocks', knowing that I had a few stars on there.  I looked at the options, then looked at what people had already done (I might have mentioned I'm late? *ahem*) and my eye lit upon this block that I had pinned from Simply Plain Jane.

Source: simplyplainjane.blogspot.com via Katy on Pinterest

Now I have no idea how I came across this, but still, I'm glad I did!  She had taken this pattern from Anna Maria Horner, and created this texty colourful mash up.  Susan had sent us a pile of fabrics in one colour family, along with some Kona Cola for the background, so I switched things round to make a colourful star:

I'll admit that I probably didn't approach this in the way AMH had planned, or, in fact, in the way anyone else has tried it, but I decided that paper piecing was the way to go here!  My first problem even for the templates, was that the shapes are on the PDF right to the edge of the page, and even flipping round and printing on A3 I still ended up with bits being trimmed off by Acrobat, so I had to complete some lines here and there.  After that I marked the included seam allowance on every piece (did I mention there's 40 in total?!) and cut them all out.  Grabbing my lapel stick, I glued each template piece on to the relevant bit of fabric, cut them all out, and started to sew them together, paper still in place.

On the whole that approach worked very well for me - I'm not sure that with all the odd angles coming together that I would have been able to match the joining points without doing this to be honest, although I will say now that the piece with parts 1, 9 and 10 is labelled incorrectly on part 10 for where it joins part 1, and that that whole section gave me the most trouble in the assembly process.  Oh well, I've got that pattern out of my system now ;o)

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