One hundred and seventy six pieces, in a quilt that measures seventeen inches by twenty.
Satellite 5 is a free diamond quilt pattern by Lynn Harris for Robert Kaufman, and every one of those pieces is wrapped around a paper and sewn by hand. A hundred and forty five sixty degree diamonds and thirty one equilateral triangles, none of them larger than an inch and a half on a side. The cover calls it experienced intermediate, and for once that label is doing real work.
It is also the most fabric-hungry small quilt I have ever costed out, and that turns out to be the most interesting thing about it.
Download the Satellite 5 Diamond Quilt Pattern
Seven pages, free, designed by Lynn Harris, published by Robert Kaufman in 2015. It features the Carkai collection by Carolyn Friedlander.
Download the Satellite 5 pattern PDF
Read the fabric section before you buy. The list asks for four yards, and there is a reason that is not a typing error.
One housekeeping note. The pattern prints Lynn Harris's blog address, The Little Red Hen at thelittleredhen.typepad.com, on its cover. That address no longer reaches her: Typepad has closed and the domain now lands on a hosting company page. The pattern itself is unaffected and the credit stands, but do not expect the link on page one to go anywhere.
Four Yards for a Seventeen Inch Quilt
Here is the arithmetic that stopped us.
The pattern asks for 1 1/2 yards of the first fabric, 1 1/4 of the second and 1 1/4 of the third. Four yards for the top. At forty inches wide that is 5,760 square inches of cloth. The finished quilt is 17 by 20, which is 340 square inches.
Seventeen times the area of the thing you are making.
That is not waste and it is not a mistake. It is what fussy cutting costs. Every piece in the rosettes is cut from a chosen spot in the print, and for a rosette of six matching diamonds you have to travel six repeats across the fabric to find the same motif six times. The background is fussy cut too. The pattern says so: fussy cut the background areas from the gray print, using the same size pieces as the rosettes, because a single large cut piece would not add to the design in the same way.
So the yardage is buying you access to the print, not area. Worth knowing before you order, because a yard and a half of a large scale designer print is a real decision and the finished object fits on a door.
What Is Actually in It
The pattern counts the pieces for you, which is unusual and useful. Added up:
Four rosettes. Unit A is six inner diamonds and six outer diamonds, twelve pieces. Unit B is three diamonds. Unit C is six center diamonds, six middle diamonds, twelve triangles and six outer diamonds, thirty pieces. Unit D is three inner diamonds and six outer, nine pieces. Fifty four pieces of rosette in total.
Then the field they sit in. One triangle from the first fabric, two triangles and twenty two diamonds for the top border, sixteen triangles and eighty one diamonds for the background. A hundred and twenty two pieces.
A hundred and seventy six altogether: 145 diamonds and 31 triangles. The background is not a background in the usual sense. It is the same two shapes as the rosettes, in the same papers, hand sewn one at a time, filling in around them.
Why a Diamond Quilt Goes to Paper
A sixty degree diamond has two acute corners, and both of its long edges run off the straight grain.
The standard reference on patchwork is direct about what that means: bias edges can cause the fabric to stretch and affect accurate piecing, and for this reason many designs with diamonds are created from templates. Acute shapes also have to be joined with the edges offset by a quarter inch so the seam lines meet where they should, which is a fiddly thing to judge at the machine on a piece this small.
English paper piecing removes both problems at once. The paper holds the shape rigid while the seam allowance is folded and basted around it, so the bias cannot move. And because the pieces are whip stitched edge to edge rather than seamed through, there is no offset to calculate. The corners meet because the papers meet.
That is the trade this pattern makes. It is slower than any machine method, and in exchange the geometry stops being a problem. If you have not done it before, our complete guide to english paper piecing covers the basting, the whip stitch and the Y seam, and our notes on basting and stitching techniques are the shorter version.
The papers you need here are 1 1/2 inch six point diamonds and 1 1/2 inch equilateral triangles. The pattern treats them as a shopping item rather than something to cut yourself, which is fair at this count.
The Viewfinder, and Why It Is the Whole Technique
Buried in the planning section is the step that makes the quilt possible, and it takes about ten minutes to build.
Trace the paper shape onto template plastic, add a quarter inch seam allowance all round the outside, cut out the shape, and then cut out the inner part so you are left with a frame. That frame is a viewfinder. You lay it on the print and it shows you exactly what the finished piece will look like with the seam allowances folded away.
Without it you are guessing where a motif will land after folding, and on a diamond that is a hard thing to picture. With it you move the frame around the cloth until the fabric looks right inside it, trace round the outside, and cut on the pencil line.
This is also where a sharp, small pair of fine point scissors earns itself. The cut here is a traced pencil line on a shape with two sharp points, not a rotary pass against a ruler. Our guide to cutting fabric accurately covers the rotary side of the house, but this quilt mostly is not rotary work.
The Mirror Image Trick
One line in the planning section is easy to read past and is the best design advice in the pattern.
The large scale print it was made from has motifs that appear as mirror images of each other. Lynn Harris points out that it can be interesting to take advantage of those mirrored designs when fussy cutting the pieces for the rosettes, and the sample rosettes show what that gets you: pieces that are nearly the same but handed, so a rosette reads as symmetrical without being identical six times over.
The centers of each rosette were made by cutting identical sections of the motif, and the outer rounds were not. That contrast between an exactly repeated center and a looser outer ring is what stops the units looking mechanical.
If you are substituting a different print, this is the property to go looking for. Not scale alone. Scale plus some kind of repeat you can exploit.
Four Rosettes and No Grid
The four units are different sizes and they are not laid out on a grid.
Unit C, the largest, is a six pointed star of thirty pieces. Unit A is a denser hexagonal rosette of twelve. Units B and D are small, nine pieces and three, and they sit low and off to one side. The background then fills in around all four with diamonds and triangles of the same size.
Which means there is no block, no row and no seam running the width of the quilt. The whole top is one continuous mosaic of two shapes, and the rosettes are simply the places where the fussy cutting was done deliberately rather than loosely.
That is a one patch design in the proper sense, and it is the reason the layout step matters more than usual. You are not assembling a plan, you are deciding where things go.
If you want a diamond quilt without the hand work, our Diamond Day pattern does it by machine and a great deal faster.
Sewing a Hundred and Seventy Six Pieces by Hand
The method is the standard one and the pattern states it in four steps.
Place the paper in the center of the fabric shape on the wrong side. Fold two edges of the fabric over the paper and take a stitch in the fold. Continue folding and stitching around the paper, through the fabric only. Leave the paper in place.
Then hold two prepared pieces right sides together and whip stitch along the edge with small stitches, catching only the fold of each piece. The needle never goes through the paper, which is what lets the papers come out at the end and the seam lie flat.
A hundred and seventy six of those is a long run, and the thing that makes it bearable is that the needle is the only tool. A fine needle with an eye you can actually thread is not a small matter when you are going to pull it through four hundred times an evening. This is the quilt for a chair, not a sewing table.
Finishing It
Backing is three quarters of a yard. Binding comes out of the second fabric, which the fabric list notes already includes it.
The quilting on the sample is designed to accent the fussy cut areas and blend the background diamonds, with a little hand applique added for accent. Then the quilt is trimmed and bound.
That trimming step is worth pausing on. Diamonds and triangles do not tile into a rectangle, so the edges of the pieced top are a zigzag of half shapes. You trim straight through them and the binding covers the cut. Our guide to quilt backing covers the margins for a piece this size, where a quarter of a yard either way makes a visible difference.
The Same Fabric, Twice
If the prints look familiar, they should. Carkai by Carolyn Friedlander is the collection behind Monte, which we published this week, and the two could not be less alike.
Monte is 750 machine pieced rectangles and squares in thirty blocks with sashing, 76 by 88 inches, and a beginner can make it. Satellite 5 is 176 hand sewn diamonds at a seventeenth of the size, and the pattern says experienced intermediate.
Same designer's fabric, two completely different propositions. Worth looking at both if you are deciding what a collection is for.
One Last Thing
I would not start here. If you have never basted a paper, start with hexagons and a flower, where the shapes forgive you and the rosette tells you when it is right.
But if you have done that and you are wondering what comes next, this is a good answer. It is small enough to finish, the shapes are only two, and the difficulty is all in the choosing rather than the sewing. Four yards of a print you love, a viewfinder, and a chair.
There are more of these in our free quilt patterns, most of them a good deal quicker.
P.S. Make the viewfinder before you cut anything. Ten minutes of template plastic will save you from a rosette where the motif is half an inch off center in every piece, which is the kind of mistake you only see once the papers come out.
