Four hourglass units, four plain corners, one square in the middle. That is an Ohio star. The version LessonsLearnt sews here keeps the hourglasses and replaces each plain corner with a small three patch, and the block stops reading as a star sitting on a background and starts reading as a star held inside a frame.
The corner is where the interest is. A square joins a rectangle, and one end of that rectangle takes a triangle corner: a small square laid on, drawn across the diagonal, sewn, trimmed and pressed over into a triangle. The hourglasses come the long way round, half square triangles first, then paired back up with opposite fabrics facing and cut a second time. One light, one medium, two darks, and it comes off the machine at 12-1/2 inches square.
The triangle corner is the part worth watching rather than reading.
This is week seven of a free sampler that runs on the LessonsLearnt channel for twenty weeks, a new block every Wednesday, with a pattern sheet for each one you can download and keep. That is the part worth knowing. You can join at any block, because a sampler does not mind what order you learn it in, and at the end of it you have twenty blocks that have each taught you something different and one quilt to show for it.
The plain Ohio star underneath all of it is worth having straight before you start changing its corners. We have written that one up in full, with what to cut for five different block sizes, how to make the four star point units so the points survive being sewn, and a free pattern sheet to print and keep next to the machine. It is all in how to make the Ohio Star quilt block.
Marbelia Fernandes
The Fabric Hut Co-Founder
P.S. If you are joining a sampler at week seven, do not go back and make the first six. Start where everyone else is this Wednesday, and pick up the earlier blocks in the winter when there is nothing new to sew.
Credit where it belongs: the tutorial is by LessonsLearnt on YouTube.
The unit underneath all of this is the quarter square triangle. If you want it on its own, with the size chart and the three ways of making it, we have written it up here: how to make quarter square triangles.
