3 min read

Christmas Star Quilt

A quilt made up of equilateral triangles and hexagons in Christmas fabrics.

Christmas star quilt close up gold thread

MATERIALS

I used 100% cotton fabrics with these Scandinavian and metallic Christmas prints I got from my local Spotlight a few years ago, for both the quilt top and quilt backing.

Some of the fabrics used are not shown here.

These are the fat quarters that form the stars in the quilt.

For the batting, I used cotton polyester blend batting.

DESIGN & DIMENSIONS

The finished quilt measured about 130 cm x 176 cm. This includes a 2 cm border and 2 cm binding (total 4 cm all around).

The quilt is made up of equilateral triangles and hexagons of the following dimensions, as well as some truncated versions of the hexagons at the corners and sides:

From the photos in this post, you can see that my triangle pieces are strip-pieced. This is entirely optional, of course. You can most definitely cut out the triangles and the red and green hexagons from single pieces of fabrics.

DOWNLOAD TEMPLATES

To download the template of each shape including the truncated hexagons, click below:

Note! Seam allowance is a quarter inch.

Buy me a cuppa?

FABRIC YARDAGE

The following diagram shows the required fabric yardage (assuming width of fabric is 43 inches):

NOTE! The above fabric yardage assumes you are cutting whole triangles from single pieces of fabrics, instead of strip-piecing them like I did in quilt pictured in this post.

PIECING

There are more than one way to sew all the pieces together, but in order to create the hexagons within the stars as one whole, uncut piece, piecing with Y-seams is necessary. Here's a good video tutorial on how to sew Y-seams by JinnyBeyerStudio.

Since my triangles are strip-pieced, I first sewed together 3 strips of 15.5 cm width with quarter inch seam allowance before cutting out the triangles from the strips. The finished width of the strips is 4cm. The top and bottom strip will be about a quarter inch more than 4cm wide at this point because they still need to be sewn to other pieces.

I chose form the hexagrams first before piecing the hexagons and truncated hexagons to them. This method involves a lot more Y-seams than the method I am going to describe next, but it gives me control and assurance of how my stars will turn out.

Alternatively, to reduce the amount of Y-seams, you can first form the following rows, and then sew the rows together. The disadvantage of this method is, if you strip-pieced your triangles with a variety of combinations of fabrics like I did, you will have to be careful in the placements of the triangles in order to achieve the stars as you desire. If you are not particular about how the stars will turn out, or if you are using whole pieces of triangles instead of strip-pieced triangles, then this will not be a problem.

Then, I sewed the 4cm white border all around to complete the quilt top.

Quilt Top Complete

BASTING

I basted the quilt top, batting and backing using pool-noodles. My go-to basting method is almost always hand-stitching with thicker waxed thread.

Quilt Basting Using Pool Noodles

QUILTING

For quilting, I first stitched in the ditch along the dashed lines below. This is tot give the quilt structure before I quilted more elaborate designs. I let each line of quilting to run over borders and out of the edges of the quilt top.