RBD Building Block Series Block #1: Friendship Star Block

[Music] welcome to our riley blake designs building block series i'm cindy cloward and i'm going to take you through step by step as we create this beautiful sampler quilt and this is a great skill building quilt so if you're a quilter join us as we sew month by month these building blocks but if you're new to quilting or sewing we are so glad you're here and we're going to take you through the easy to the little more challenging one step at a time so let's get started with our first quilt block which is the friendship star or known as the four pointed star it's an easy block to get started on these are the supplies needed to create this block [Music] to make this block you first need to make your half square triangles let me show you how easy it is to do so you're going to take your two of your colored blocks and you're going to mark them in the center corner to corner so you can use a marking tool i i'm just simply using a mechanical pencil use your ruler mark it corner to corner on two of your blocks then you get the same size white block and put it underneath your colored block how that's lined in i usually throw a pin in there you don't have to but to get it from to the machine without shifting you can toss a pin in now this marked line is not your sewing line it's what you line your foot up fourth inch on each side and you're going to sew one down you're going to sew down one side and sew back down on the other side using a fourth inch seam allowance we're going to create two blocks at a time let's take it to the machine and sew okay i've chain pieced this together i'm just going to take out my pins cut my threads in between and now your marking line is going to be your cutting line you can use scissors but of course a rotary cutter is quick and easy to cut right down the center now take it to your pressing station you can open up and now you've got four half square triangles i'm gonna just set my stitches sometimes i do a group of pressing at a time all together like that and then i'm going to open up your half square triangle just like that as it cools i like to put my quilter's clapper on there it absorbs the heat and i've been using steam moisture but i'm just using a hot iron i'm going to grab my rotating mat to trim up my blocks these have cooled a bit have nice crisp seams and now we need to square up our block we have these lori holt square up rulers they're really great to trim your block to the size that you want which is four and a half inches so you line that up the center marking on the center of your sew line your seam and these rotating mats are just fantastic i'm going to put these off to the side to rotary cut especially small blocks and these are this was designed by sue daley so take a look at that that's a perfectly squared up block and you're going to repeat that on each of the remaining blocks i'm going to throw away my scraps move this down here and we're ready to start assembling our block we've previously cut out these blocks that are already four and a half inches and let's lay out our pieces together we know that we have a four and a half inch pink square in the middle and then around our quilt block we are making our friendship star or four-pointed star i think i like the name friendship star the best we got got all of our half square triangles going the right way and then in the remaining four corners we just have a solid white fabric so here it is ready to sew together i sew a section at a time and i'm going to sew this middle section to the outside section let me show you what i mean i flip it over right sides together lining them up and i put a pin at the top now if you're new to sewing you might want to put one in the middle and even at the bottom but by putting a pin at the top i know where i'm starting my sewing and i go down from top to bottom and it helps me keep track of the direction i'm sewing but you can play with pinning see what works for you it is important to keep your blocks lined up so they don't shift and these design boards are excellent to move it to the machine so things aren't moving around as you're walking to your machine so i'm going to take this first block and i'm going to chain piece all three sections using my fourth inch seam allowance so i've got my chain piece here and i'm not going to clip my threads between my units and i'm going to show you why because i want them to still stay together so i'm opening this up and i'm choosing not to press at this point and i'm going to sew my last section to my middle again i'm going to throw a pin in the top pin as much or as little as you'd like in the early days of quilting i'd pin everything now i i can use less pins as i go along okay let's take the machine and sew okay so we have this all chain pieced and you can see that we've got our three rows our three units all sewn together and it's all held together by the threads so i'm still not going to clip the threads you don't need to at this point and i'm going to flip the top over to the middle section now this is why i haven't pressed because i'm going to decide which way i want my seams to go because i want my scenes to you know nest or i use the word nestle together which means my top scenes are going to go one direction my bottom seams are going to go another so see how those nest together just like that and i kind of finger press them like that they just kind of lock into place i put a pin in there and i'm going to pin a little bit more on the outside here so this seam is going to go towards the center i'm going to set push this seam towards the center as well and then these the top seams are going to go to the outside see how i just nest those seams just like that let's take a machine and sew let's bring it back take a look at that those line up just like that because we just nestled our seams just right we just we're going to repeat that same thing here that center section is going to go towards the center like that we're going to nest our seams taking a moment on this step will give you great results on lining up your points and your your all your sections together okay we have finished our block now we just need to press and square it up so i'm going to take it over to my pressing station and before i do that normally i don't press on the back side but i'm just kind of making sure my seams are going the right way the direction i want them to go let me give this a little spritz open it up press it out just like that sometimes i get to ironing instead of leaving my iron pressing for a minute you get better results the longer you press in a section so there we go works even better with this clapper again i'm just going to give that a little spritz i want my seams to go a certain direction back so i'm just kind of pressing those just doing a quick iron over that [Music] i fold it over take my iron from the center and i kind of press out to the edges and a lot of times they tell you to lift up your iron especially if your fabric's wet because you don't want to stretch your fabric that's why pressing is a little different than ironing i'm just going to press one more section and i think it's almost ready to go and take my clapper take a look at that so our block is ready to be squared up we have our square up rulers this is 12 and a half inch and the design on this is meant to show you where your fourth inch seam allowance is so anything outside of this is going to be caught up in your seam so what you want to look at so you want to center this in your block is that all your points are inside this blue line and they won't get cut off with your seam and we know all of our measurements if we sew accurately we shouldn't have to trim up much but again we're not perfect so sometimes you have to trim up a little bit but make sure to not trim off your points so mainly i just have a few little threads on the outside it looks pretty good looking at all yep one more side take a look and you have this grid pattern and you can just line up all your blocks on the grid and you can see where if there's an adjustment you need to do in your sewing this is where you can note how how you're doing on your sewing and your block is finished congratulations on making your friendship star join us next time as we create our second block in this series our square and square block or you may have know it by the economy block

Channel: Riley Blake Designs

Views: 13,085

Rating: 4.9847136 out of 5

Keywords: building blocks, block 1, friendship block, 4 pointed star block, sampler quilt, riley blake designs, building block series, quilt tutorial

Id: PT1kgdObv_4

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021