Amazon Star Assembly Begun

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I've been working like a crazy person on my Amazon Star quilt designed by Judy Niemeyer. I'm not sure why, but I'm really driven to finish this one! (Or, at least, the quilt top. It'll be a while before I can do the quilting....). 

First, I had to finish making all of the units. There were quite a few left to do, but some of them were pretty small. The part 5 units were pretty quick:

Amazon Star - Part 5 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 5 Left Units

The part 6 units were also pretty quick.

Amazon Star - Part 6 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 6 Left Units

With those units, I was starting to see the quilt come together.

Amazon Star - Units Through Part 6

This was getting me excited! Now I just had to make the outer units.

Amazon Star - Part 7 Units

Amazon Star - Part 8 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 8 Left Units

As the spikes got longer, the units got more difficult to make. For the final units, I found that I had to use pins to hold the fabric pieces in place while sewing.

Amazon Star - Part 9 Right Units

Amazon Star - Part 9 Left Units

Whew! With all of the units finished, I was able to start the assembly. I got the center star put together, then got the side pieces assembled. Here is everything laid out on the floor:

Amazon Star - Current Progress

Now I'm starting on the assembly of the corner units. The sewing itself goes pretty quickly, but I have to take the time to pull out the papers from the units when instructed. The hardest part about the sewing is that this is an old Judy Niemeyer pattern so it doesn't have the "smart corners" integrated into the pattern pieces. On current patterns, Judy has you cut off the extra fabric on the corners so that you can just line of the edges of the pieces in the corners to get things to fit properly. In the older patterns this isn't done so you have to figure out how to do that yourself. This can be difficult when the pieces have very sharp corners. This is hard to explain in words, so let me show you an example. Here is a place where I'm connecting a sharp spike to another piece. Here are the pieces from each side:

Pieces From Spke Side

Pieces From Other Side

I had to figure out how far the point of the spike needed to protrude in order to get a straight edges from the spike to the yellow piece. It look completely wrong! But, as you can see, when you press the seam, you get a straight edge:

Resulting Straight Edge

The trick to getting the straight edge is to line up the pieces so that the point of the "v" created when you lay the one piece on top of the other is exactly 1/4" from the raw edge you are sewing. This can be difficult to get right. In the newer Judy Niemeyer patterns, the pattern piece would have the tip of the blue piece cut off so that you just line up those edges to get perfect matches. I hope that makes sense!

Anyway, that's all for this week. I'm guessing I'll have this top completely assembled by next week. Cross your fingers for me!

Nancy