Four cuts turn two ten inch squares into eight half square triangles. Ashley Tomlinson builds an entire Halloween quilt on that arithmetic, and one layer cake hands her the forty squares she needs to start.
She runs Sunny Made, and what makes this tutorial worth the time is not the technique, which plenty of people demonstrate, but the accounting around it. The forty squares split into two stacks of twenty. One stack pairs with ten inch background squares. The other pairs with itself, two contrasting prints at a time, and that is where the second color in the block comes from.
The rest she says out loud as she works. Draw both diagonals on the lighter square, pin, sew down both sides of both lines, then cut four times: along the two drawn diagonals, then horizontally through the X in the middle, then vertically through the same X. Eight units from every pair. Everything trims to four and a half inches, the block finishes at seventeen and a half unfinished, and twenty blocks laid four across and five down land at roughly seventy one by eighty eight, close to a twin.
The tutorial went up in September 2026.
Two things make it worth watching rather than reading. The first is the trimming. She runs the diagonal line of a square ruler down the seam, trims the right and top edges, turns the unit, sets those trimmed edges against the four and a half inch lines and trims the other two. She also gets it wrong on camera once, finds a unit too small, and does it again properly, which is more useful than a clean take. The second is the sashing shortcut she saves for the end. Rather than cutting and joining individual one and a half inch strips, she sews wide strips together first, presses them toward the dark fabric, and then cuts the joined unit crosswise at one and a half inches. Same sashing, a fraction of the seams.
She calls the block a ribbon block and says openly that she does not know whether that is its name. The pattern on her site is the Halloween Star.
The technique underneath all of it is the one we wrote up as the magic eight method, with the math for working backward from the size you want.
The channel is Sunny Made, where Ashley Tomlinson posts free quilt pattern tutorials.
