Twelve star blocks at 16 inches each, set three across and four down, came to 48 by 64 inches. That is a lap quilt, and Linda Mielke wanted one for a full size bed. The usual answer is a wide plain border, and she says she did not like the thought of it.
What she did instead, on her channel Ms. Linda Mielke Quilts, was go back to the offcuts from the same quilt. They were too small for another 16 inch block, so she cut them into 3 1/2 inch squares and built a border of smaller stars out of them. The finished quilt measures 66 by 82 inches.
The border blocks are wonky stars, and the method is nearly all chain piecing. Four of the 3 1/2 inch squares are cut in half on the diagonal for the points. Four more become the units those points sit on, one triangle sewn across a corner, pressed, then the second on the other side. She presses between the two points rather than after both, squares every unit back to 3 1/2 inches, and lays nine of them out as a nine patch, which brings the block to nine inches. The folded back triangles stay on. She does not trim them, because they hold the unit steady while she joins it to the next one.
The part most tutorials skip is the fitting. Her panel of small stars came out slightly longer than the row of 16 inch blocks, so she matched the seams at top and bottom and took the difference out of the side seams, sewing some at 3/8 and some at 5/8 instead of a quarter inch. No star had to come apart, and none of it shows.
The video has passed six thousand views since it went up in September, and it runs long enough to cover the quilting too, in diagonal rows with a walking foot and a spacer bar. Her summary of the two halves is the best line in it: the large stars followed the rules, and the little stars broke them.
If your scrap bins need a plan rather than another container, our guide to sorting scraps and sewing them into a quilt goes from the sorting through to the finished top.
The channel is Ms. Linda Mielke Quilts, where Linda posts her scrap quilting and quilt as you go projects.
