Rachel's Star

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Difficulty:

Category: Quilting

Type of item: Home Decor

For: Other

Style: Religious

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Materials

Quilting cotton, batting.

What was your inspiration?

I came across this hexagon quilt with a Star of David in the centre and thought it would be perfect for my local Jewish community. They are a fairly small community, do not have a synagogue, and borrow various premises such as community centres and churches. I thought they would appreciate having something decorative and Jewish-looking to use at services to make the place feel more like their own. I also found a range of fabrics inspired by Klimt, realised that they would be a wonderful match for the pattern, and that was when the whole idea clicked for me.

What are you most proud of?

Working with the border prints, particularly fussy-cutting the six triangles I used to make up the centre hexagon. I got the idea for that from Jinny Beyer's book "Quiltmaking By Hand".

What advice would you give someone starting this project?

I traced all the templates onto freezer paper, and then ironed those onto the fabrics and drew around them. It worked very nicely.

You need to be able to sew Y seams and partial seams.

If you use six triangles of a border print to make up the centre hexagon as I did, you need to mark the different parts of the pattern carefully onto your template so that you cut the fabric in the right place. It's not the most thrifty way to use fabric, but it does look good. Another option that I've seen done is to have a fairly plain fabric for the centre hexagon and then do fancy quilting in there.

If you run "Rachel's Star quilt" through Google Image you will see a few other versions, all with different value placements for the diamond log cabins which create different effects. It's useful when planning your own layout.

Blue and gold is a popular colour combination for this quilt, and a good traditional Jewish combination too.