Vintage Quilt Tutorial: Paper Pieced Star

 Happy Thursday and welcome to another tutorial inspired by a vintage quilt. You can see the inspiration for today's tutorial here.

This tutorial is similar to another paper piecing tutorial (hexagons) and you can check it out here

For this block you will need 6 paper diamonds, 6 fabric rectangles (5"X2.5"), and either a glue pen or a needle and thread

Using the paper diamond as a template cut your rectangles leaving a generous 1/4" bigger than the paper. This will cut down on bulk.
Dot a bit of glue in the center of the paper and press to the wrong side of the fabric. This will help keep the paper from sliding around.

Glue basting method:
trace a line of glue down one side of the paper, fold the fabric over and press.

Do the same for all 4 sides. Voila.

Hand sewing method:
Fold over the fabric on the side point and stitch 2 small stitches through all fabric layers.
Go up to the top corner and do the same

I like to heat press my hand sewn diamonds.
Here are 5 hand sewn and 1 glue based diamond

Now to join the diamonds. Place 2 diamonds, right sides together, and sew a whip stitch from point to point. I like to start and stop each end with 2 stitches to add reinforcement.

Ta-da. Matching thread will help make the stitches less noticeable on the other side.

Here is the first unit

Continue adding diamonds the same way. Here is half of the star untit

Stitch the last side by  folding the unit in half and sew from the middle out.

We did it. You can fussy cut your fabric and create a nice spinning effect with the fabric.

After all the diamonds are sewn I iron the center points in a fan to reduce bulk.

You can make add the spacers in the same way as the star pieces. Sew from the outside point to the middle, make a few extra stitches int he center for reinforcement and back up the other side to the outer point.

All stitched up.

And the back.
Next time I will show you a few ways to join your stars and spacers. I will aslo be adding the Sewline glue pens to our Etsy shop if you want to give that a try too.