One thing that keeps me quilting is the sweet sense of discovery.  There are endless ways to arrange shapes, to construct stars, to organize color.  And although I assume that everything really has been done before, there's plenty that is new and fresh to my eyes, heaps of delightful designs to uncover and enjoy. 

Once upon a time I sketched up a design that yielded closely nested, 6-pointed stars created entirely by machine with regular straight lines.  Pitter pat went my heart.   6-pointed stars are usually English Paper Pieced, a handstitched process.  Sometimes I do like to hand sew, but other times I want to see a project come together much, much faster.

When I finally worked out a color story that suited my scraps, I sewed up two rows and shared the above photo to my Flickr stream.   The response was pretty darn encouraging.  It seems you all are as excited as I to sew up some machine pieced, 6-pointed stars.

The good news? 

In Angled class I'll show you how! In the third week of Angled we'll be cementing skills for properly sewing together any angle. It doesn't matter if the angle is a diamond, a triangle, an irregular shape, tiny, huge, whatever.  Once you understand what to look for, you can sew any angle in such a way to create a 1/4" seam allowance that protects your points.   Really, you can!

My Starbright quilt is formed from a triangle-shaped quilt block.  Each triangle Starbright block is composed of 3 diamonds and 3 triangles.  As you become comfortable sewing these compound angle blocks, you'll realize that you have angles mastered. This is all straight seam sewing - no partial or y-seams.  You can do this!  Lots of step-by-step photos are provided to hold your hand all the way through.

Starbright is definitely a scrap-friendly quilt.  You can plan out your stars to be monochromatic, as I've done here, or just let them be scrappy colors that twinkle with random happiness.  Make yours as large or small as you like!

With the addition of Starbright I've now shared 3 out of the 5 full-sized quilts included in Angled online class this fall.  The first one was Indian Blanket, playing on the equilateral triangle, and the second was Emerge, from diamonds.  The following 2 quilt designs include classic angled quilt blocks:  flying geese and half square triangles.  Stay tuned to see more!

p.s.  Looking for more details?  See the introductory Angled post here.