My First Lone Star

My quilting goal this past year has been to challenge myself (my goal next year is to actually quilt and finish all these wonderful tops I've been making!). I'm a sucker for easy and quick patterns with modern, fun fabrics. But after awhile, I was getting bored.

Here is the finished quilt top for my very first lone star quilt.

Before you become too impressed with my mad skills, this was pieced using what I describe as the "cheater method." I used a jelly roll and followed a pattern out of the Jelly Roll Quilts book:

This means I didn't have to do any of that pesky y-seam piecing shananagins. I simply sewed some strips together, then cut at an angle, sewed strips together again, and wall-lah! 8 diamond chunks to sew together for each star. I would show a picture from the book that shows this technique but that is probably illegal, so I won't. Just know it sure as heck was quicker and easier than the traditional method.

First step, selecting strips to go together for each of the four stars. Sounds easier than it was. I had plenty of brain fart moments trying to figure out which color went where to end up in the finished star how I wanted it.

Here are my four sets of strips:

First star done:

All four done, sans sashing and border:

And another shot of the final top:

The fabric used was a jelly roll of Hometown by Sweetwater for Moda. No clue how I will quilt this baby.