Heavenly Stars

Heavenly Days is more like it, I should say! There are 56 pieces. Because I can’t pivot at the "Y" and count on accurate seaming, there are 88 separate seams.

They do love these 45 degree angles. Good thing I’ve had lots of practice with the APQ project. Judy Rehmel also calls this block Snow Crystal or Captive Beauty.

This had to have originally been hand-pieced because I don’t see those ladies at Land’s End cussin’ this thing and that’s what I’ve been close to doing. Not that hand-piecing would have made it a breeze.

And just when I get most all of it put together and measure one side, I find I have to take the outer edge apart. These blocks are supposed to measure 15.5 inches unfinished. This one measured 16.25 inches. Not good.

So how to resolve this problem.

Take out the red pieces.

Take out part of the seams between selected diamond pairs.

Measure down 0.375 inch from the point of each outer diamond parallel with the side of the block and…gulp…slice off that extra bit.

In theory this should give me the correct size once the red bits are sewn back in. Add 15 more seams for the correction.

So to test this theory, I only trimmed two sets on opposite sides of the block so I could take a measurement when they were back together.

Oh, yeah, it worked!

The outer diamonds end up just a tad smaller than the rest, but there is just no way to fix this short of re-sizing the templates, and frankly, I don’t know how I would go about that…without cussin’, that is.

But this is why I did this tricky block early in the project. I’m just glad the first one worked out or I would be very discouraged about now.

On to the next one.