New weapon–Magic Star

Since my grandson is into video games with tanks and planes and battles, he’s got me thinking in terms of weapons and fire power, too. The Scrap Wars in my studio are going to be facing a new weapon! I’ll ‘picture’ it out for you, but I haven’t made enough blocks to show you a quilt top…just a couple of test blocks. This is not my invention and you may all know about it already, but I’m having fun with it. It’s called the Magic Star and it will have star billing in my Scrap Wars story.

And I got my information from this blog (edited 2/3/22-post that this links to has apparently been taken down) which is probably more detailed than mine, so please check it out!

Start with two 10″ squares. I’m cutting mine from yardage/fat quarter pieces. In fact, the dark pieces here are leftover bits that I’m sure I’ve kicked around for 20 years or more! You can certainly use the pre-cut squares and if you want to do the math, you can easily change the starting size. I’m NOT going to do that math because I’m happy to use up bigger chunks!

Cut a 3.5″ strip from one side and then turn the rectangle and cut a 3.5″ strip from the short side.

You will switch the remaining 6.5″ squares, bringing the bottom one to the top. Sew the blocks back together as shown in the next pic. Sew the short strip onto the square first, finger press and then sew the longer strip.

There will be a little extra section to trim off the block before the next step.

Stack the blocks, matching the positions of the pieces. You will make a diagonal cut, being sure to cut across the corner of the square.

Once again, move one bottom half to the top and then you will re-sew along the diagonals.

There are no seams to match, either, only the ends. And it IS sewing on the bias, so don’t pull or stretch it out of shape! It’s possible that you may need to trim your blocks, but I sewed kinda carefully so mine came out just fine as 9″ blocks.

It certainly took longer to write this out than to make the blocks! I quickly made a second tester to see how they make a star.

And a couple more, since I had the dark squares already cut! I made these the same, but I’m already wondering about big stacks and switching colors. I think it will be fine if I stick with strictly dark and light.

When I have a bunch more of these made, I can play with different layouts, too. This is going to be fun!