Oxford Star

I am making my version of a quilt my grandmother made. It is the Texas Star quilt -- a six-pointed star with a hexagon center. I've named it Oxford Star because my grandmother was born and lived her whole life in the town of Oxford, Idaho. This is one of the six quilts she gave to my mother.

Here's my grandma's quilt (made probably in the 1950s). 

She machine pieced the stars and hand quilted the quilt. 

I am making my version using Lollies fabric by Jen Kingwell for Moda. The fabrics I chose have eight prints in the width of fabric that all coordinate with each other and that are separated by the gray stripe. So it looks like I've combined multiple fabrics in each star -- but it is kind of a "cheater cloth". 

Some of the blocks use the same fabrics for all six points:

Some blocks use two fabric selections for the star points:

Like my grandmother, I'm also machine piecing the stars. I've completed 25 of the 46 full star blocks. There will also be six half-size blocks. I will be setting the stars with charcoal gray diamonds. 

Lots of Y-seams, but they have been pretty easy to do. I'll be an expert at them by the time this quilt is done.

My blocks are about an inch smaller than my grandma's stars, but that was because I'm using Perfect Patchwork Templates set H by Marti Michell to cut the hexagons, diamonds, and star points.

Over the past year or so this has been a popular quilt made using English Paper Piecing techniques. You can see a fabulous example at Red Pepper Quilts; her quilt is named Daisy Chain. Her finished stars are a bit smaller than mine.

My goal is to have this quilt finished, quilted, and bound by our family reunion at the beginning of July. 

Quilt Fate

So you probably know already that I work in the quilting industry. I do marketing communications for longarm quilting machine manufacturer Handi Quilter. Which means I'm surrounded by quilts. No complaints here!

Well, my boss is a collector of vintage quilt tops. But this past week she showed off her latest quilt acquisition one morning. Only it wasn't an unfinished top, it was a finished quilt. Full bed size. And it was a design I'd never seen before. (Or at least as far as I could remember.)

Here's the quilt:

Isn't it interesting? And so modern looking. Machine pieced, but hand quilted. It was acquired via an antique shop in the south, so probably made by a southern quilt maker. As we examined the fabrics, we determined that it was probably from the 20s. It has very thick batting -- probably cotton. We also surmised that the batting was probably locally sourced cotton and then pounded into the batting. The backing is flannel and was brought around the edge of the quilt to form the binding.

Clearly the maker of this quilt was very skilled. The arcs nicely matched between blocks. I made my mind up to try to draft the pattern in Electric Quilt and make it with today's fabrics. The blocks finish 12 inches and the center square was between four and four and a half inches (depending on the block I measured).

Flash forward until the end of the workday. A little background: I'm attending the Winter Quilt Fest quilt retreat in January up in Logan, Utah. I'm taking three classes, one of which will be taught by Jen Kingwell, Australian quilt designer and Moda fabric designer. Well, I decided to look up what the fabric requirements are for her class so I could start assembling my fabrics.

Well, imagine my surprise when I looked closely at the class I'm taking from Jen:

Look familiar? Yep, except that instead of a plain center square, Jen's quilt (named Halo) uses a square-in-a-square block. And it's a bit scrappier. I am totally stoked to take this class in about five weeks.

So, although I thought I'd never seen the quilt design before, turns out I have. And I don't need to go to the trouble to draft the block.