I purchased a Christmas fabric collection on sale last winter so a few weeks ago I decided to just get a head start on my Christmas sewing and designed a new quilt!

This block design is from the Electric Quilt 8 Block Library which is included with the computer program. The block is called “Aunt Addie’s Album”. (I wonder if she collected truck drawings)! I chose this block for the large central patch which is great for fussing cutting a fabric. The way I set up this block, it will finish at 8 inches square. The central patch is a generous 4 inches square, an ample size for featuring a special fabric.

The star points are seemingly simple half square triangles. True, they aren’t hard to sew, but you need to be careful. The pair of points on each side of the star are actually mirror image blocks. It’d be tempting to just to chain sew all the red and green squares together. But you if you haven’t planned ahead, you won’t have the mirror image pairs that you need.

What worked for me was setting up the 4 pairs needed for a single block. I put down the 8 green patches next to each other and then put the red patches in position next to them. This assured I would have mirrored pairs. Then I chain pieced all the right hand sets and then the left hand sets.

Doing that, I had just what I needed to sew the quilt block and I knew I had exactly the correct number of patches.

OK. This is project is actually “secret sewing” for a Christmas present. So that’s it for now. But I definitely will post the final quilt before the end of 2021!