Do you recall THIS rather bright star block that I made back in February. I think is was my attempt at bringing some much needed colour in my life, but now that the days are getting longer and the light is changing this block went from cheery to plain old in-your-face-loud!

So what’s a girl to do, but make an attempt to tone it down and, more to the point, make it a useful loveable object! :o) So sit back and see how something that started off as a 16” loud block became a rather pleasant quilt top ready for some pretty quilting.

So the first thing I did was add some flying geese to the edge to echo the flying geese in the centre and then I added a plain pink border. I had this idea of a Seminole border so I needed to add another plain border so that it would fit. This also gave me the opportunity to add some more red to tie in the red from the centre. I actually made my Seminole sides first and then worked out the size my inner square needed to be and then sized the red borders to fit.

The four patches in the Seminole border measure 3” finished so on point they measure near enough to 4 1/4” on point (3” x 1.414)… that made a decent width and was also a number that was easy to work out the maths for the pattern repeat on the sides.
(as an aside do you know about 1.414? Take the finished measure of a square block and multiple it by 1.414 and you’ll have the measurement of the block on point)

As the four patches need to be 3” finished, I used 2 strips 2” wide and then oversized the sides by 1/2” so I would have room for error.

Once my strips had been sewn together I segmented the sets into 2” strips.


By rotated each strip I could start to see the four patches taking shape and the border layout emerging.

I sewed all my strips into 4 patches.

Then each 4 patch set was sewn to the next, off-setting it so the blocks ran diagonally down the strip.

Once the whole strip was sewn I added a 4” square top and bottom to finish off the corner.

Carefully I trimmed 1/4” away from each point all the way up the strip and squared up the top and bottom. Then it was just a matter of sewing it to the quilt like a regular border.


Another solid border was added before a piano key border was added to bring the quilt out to a good size. What started as a pretty loud block has been transformed back into something cheery and perfect for a girl who loves pink.

Until next time...♥