The Lone Starburst

One of my favorite Flickr quilting bee "genres" are the sampler quilt bees: the 3 x 6 Sampler Quilt Mini Bee and its cousin, the 4x5 modern Quilt Bee.

You make 5 (or 6, depending on the bee) blocks (of your own choice) in colors requested by your beehive-mates. You mail them out, and pretty soon packages arrive from your hive: blocks for you, in your colors, dreamed up by them. I love the creativity these bees inspire in all members, and I've been able to challenge myself and have a lot of fun!

This past quarter, I looked through my flickr favorites and decided to do something like this block by Johanna for 3x6, but scaled up a bit and made into a square.

I thought it would be perfect for paper-piecing, but I couldn't find a template anywhere that looked anything like it. I've also seen something similar called a Connecticut Star, but couldn't find one of those either.  So, I drafted my own with some graph paper and my quilting ruler, and photocopied away.

If you've done a fair amount if paper-piecing, I'm sure you can do the same!  However, after going through some intense photoshop trial-and-error, digital templates are here via via Google Doc.  It's called the Lone Starburst, since it has the basic shape of a traditional Lone Star quilt.  Print four at 100% for a 12.5-inch unfinished block.

Edit: Printing Tips! Google docs isn't the best for templates, so I'd recommend downloading/saving the template to your computer, then opening it with your usual PDF viewer (adobe, preview, etc) to print from there. Make sure that scaling is set to 100% or "none"' (so your comp doesn't try to "fit" it to a page), and measure the 1 inch scale line once printed to make sure it's exactly an inch, no more, no less!  Also, you can measure the edge of one of the templates to make sure it measures 6.5 inches, including the gray seam allowances. 

It's versatile! One of my favorite parts of sampler bees is that you can try out all different color arrangements.  I found that I liked the look of this block best when I choose a fabric with a lot of contrast for the skinny 1/4-inch star outline, which makes the most of the design.

By switching up the values, you can go monochromatic.

This scrappy one is just delicious.  In this case, I used white for the 1/4-inch outline, and mostly tried to alternate warm and cool colors.

Thanks to my friend Moni for inspiring me to do this on my own.  She drafted up a version that's a bit bigger (less background space), which is available via her blog.