Sew Your Stash Series #10 - Criss-Cross Star Quilt Block!!

[Music] [Music] well hello everybody and welcome back to my sewing room today is sew your stash series number 10 and i'm excited to show you my crisscross stars block now some of you may have seen this before um if you've taken my scrappy happy workshops over the years i teach this several times because i love to do this with just squares so i have a lot of leftover squares and so i thought this one this week i would talk about squares and this would be the perfect block so how i get my leftover squares is i trim them from my scraps from bigger projects like if i have a little bit left over fabric then i'll cut them into squares however big i can and i usually do you know like four and a half three and a half two and a half and one and a half and then also when i'm trimming off of my easy corner triangles then i'll the trimmings off of that i've shown you that before i cut those into squares and i cut those into squares if i can cut at least a one and a half inch square that's the smallest size that i save and so also when i'm how i get square so here's my two and a half inch bin here's my three and a half inch bin and then here's my four and a half inch bin so you can see i have less four and a half because those are the squares that i happen to use for the blocks that you saw on the design wall so i really used a lot of those i really have a lot of three and a half and two and a half but sometimes when i'm getting low on a color like you can see the yellow is kind of low or maybe the neutrals the grays and browns are kind of low then i'll get my scrappy strip basket out that coordinates with this size so i would grab my two and a half inch and just grab the yellows and the browns and just cut a bunch of squares off of that and add to my bins for when i'm doing a block like this so that i have plenty of colors to choose from and it's really fun to just work with squares and i love that they're you know mostly all from leftovers and this is a perfect block for that so now let's talk about the block again it's called my crisscross stars block and what i love about this is this is all squares this is a square but see how they cross over like this and then the points don't go all the way to the end so you don't ever have to worry about cutting off your points or sewing your points and off and also i don't worry about the direction i just do an easy corner triangle first and then i do another easy corner triangle this way so meaning i don't have to have them all going the outside points that end up at the top going the same direction see how these two are at the top but these two going this direction this one's at the top i kind of like how that looks it adds the charm and i don't have to worry about making this block perfect it's just a fun way to use up your scraps and you can play with any size squares that you want so let's talk about the cutting so this is the 15 inch block it finishes at 15 inches right now it measures 15 and a half inches because it's not sewn into a quilt but those are the ones that you saw in my design wall and i have 12 blocks up there i could just keep adding blocks and just sewing them together and again i don't ever have to worry about sewing my points off because i did again another block that is kind of like building sashing so for the cutting for that let me just remove this and i wrote this down for you so here is here's the whole thing that you need for one 15 inch block for the crisscross stars so you're going to need eight five and a half inch background squares you're going to need one for the center and that's five and a half inch so the background and the center square are always the same size and then you're going to go one inch smaller for the star points so all of these star points are scrappy squares and they're four and a half inches so let me pull that up a little bit to the camera so you can see that close up and you may want to take a screenshot or just copy it down but each block is only two measurements that you have to remember the background and the center are the same and the star points are all the same so 15 inch block five and a half inch for the background in the center and four and a half inch squares for the star points okay now this is a 12 inch block so now we're just working with different size squares for it i'm going to show you how to do a 12 inch block today also one of these up so here's the 12 inch block again you can see that these are all different directions i'm not worrying about you know how i do my easy corner triangles and i like how it looks just um kind of willy-nilly however they end up i really like that okay so here's the cutting for this let me pull it up a little bit closer so for this one you need a background again but these are cut four and a half the center is cut four and a half and then the star points are three and a half so let me pull that up closer that cutting just and leave it there for a few seconds so you can again screenshot it or copy it down we're doing four and a half and three and a half and that's for a 12 inch finished block so the last size i have for you is the nine inch so these are nine inch blocks i sure love these and again i just love how these star points just float so that you can just sew the blocks right together and not have to worry about any sashing or anything and it really makes it easy for the math too when you don't have to worry about sashings when you know your block is going to finish at 9 inches or 12 inches or 15 inches then all you have to do is just sew them together and you can easily figure out you know how big your quilt is going to be if you sew eight blocks together or something like that you just have to times eight by nine you know that's how wide it's going to be or how tall it's going to be so it really makes it easy for quilty math and i'm all for easy quilting math okay so here's the cutting for the nine inch block so for the background and the center you're going to be using three and a half inches square and for the star points are two and a half inch squares and so i hope you can see that let that pause for a minute and now let's go to the sewing machine and i'll show you how to sew all these squares together into cute crisscross star blocks all right let's get started on this 12 inch block so here's the cutting again i think you've seen that enough so i'll just throw that to the side and what i usually do when i start out is i have a bigger design board right here and i'll just put the center block there and then i'll lay out the four background blocks this way sorry the four background squares that go in the corners because these are the four background squares that you're going to sew the points on and so i just grab these and then i have all of these to work with so i don't think i need them all out on the design board like this i'm just going to put them down on the table now usually when i've been doing these i just make sure that when i have like for instance i have the red colored square here so i make sure that i don't have a red here for the points and i usually don't pull them all out i just kind of grab for my square bins so it's really easy so all you do is i've got the larger background square i've got the smaller star point and i just line up the corners and i'm going to sew from corner to corner i've got my seam so easy guide on right here and i'm just going to follow this center line [Music] okay so now i'm just going to trim an approximate quarter inch seam allowance so you can bet that i saved these because i know that i can get a one and a half inch square so right right over here in this little little cute little pyrex container is where i just throw these in here and you can see that you can just take here i'll just grab a here i want to grab this color so you can see you can see that you can trim a one and a half inch square out of that and so instead of stopping and doing it with each block i usually just grab a container and throw them in there and then i'll trim them all at the end so when you're doing the 12 inch block you can get one and a half inch squares out of the trimmings and so then i just go over here and i'm not going to press these seams open i just press them towards start points and again because they're on the bias i try not to work it back and forth too much and then you can put a clapper on there if you want to cool them down and get them flat now this is where i was talking about putting the star points on different directions if you want them going all different kinds of directions like this or you could have them going all the same direction so if you want to do the same direction just make sure that when you're adding the other square on that all of your fabric you know your prints are on that side and then go ahead but if you don't you can turn a couple and just kind of have it like i say willy-nilly and kind of crazy and that's how i prefer these blocks so i simply just do the same thing you don't have to worry about any points or seams because it's going to overlap and i just add the other four on the other side [Music] okay so now i've got all those segments sewn together and all i do is just kind of lay it out and see if that's the placement that i like i don't know i might trade places with whoops that's why you have a design board so you know you flip them the right direction okay okay get that thread off okay so that's how i like it i think that's going to be a cute one so i'm just going to go ahead and sew this row this row this row and then sew the whole block together just like you would a nine patch [Music] okay so i'm using the clappers to make this block flat i know that if you've watched my other videos you see that i always do this and they just absorb the heat and allow the block to cool off faster and so the faster it cools off in a flat surface then it will remain flat okay so here is a 12 inch block isn't that cute and super easy to make love doing scrappy stuff now this measures 12 and a half inches now it will measure 12 inches when you sew them together and you know you can put sashings in between you can put cornerstones you can put alternate blocks like you could cut a 12 and a half inch square of a print of a color and put in between every block or you can make the whole quilt out of all stars whatever you want to do and the 15 inch size that you saw on my wall is fun because that quilt works up really fast because they're larger blocks and um you know this to make a larger quilt you would just make a few more blocks and then the nine inch here i put four of these out on here i just wanted to kind of give you an example on what the nine inch might look like put together these would be really cute with an alternate block as well but i love how i don't have to worry about the points i love how i don't have to worry about which way which point is uncovered and which point is not covered or crisscrossed however you want to say it and they're going all different directions like any stars do and i love working with squares i as you can see i have a lot of squares and i like to think up a lot of projects that use squares because um i have a lot of them and it's really really fun to just use all different colors and my scrappy happy colors and sew away for an afternoon and relax and you know see what i can come up with i hope you enjoy this block i hope you make several of your own i hope you're enjoying my scra so your stash series i'm going to keep going on that i'll have a few more blocks next month and i hope you all have a merry christmas and i'll chat with you later [Music]

Channel: Lori Holt

Views: 231,999

Rating: 4.953793 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: sncKxivM5ug

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/NeedsTheBeach]

Wow I loved that. Thanks for posting. It's great that you don't have to worry about the points out at the edges.

[u/ProduceJumpy6717]

Gosh those are gorgeous. Thanks for sharing

[u/JFT-1994]

Also, considering this one as Plan B.

[u/wannabeflowerchild21]

Those are fantastic!!!