Star-Crossed Again

The Easy String Star class has been getting a lot of attention lately. Guilds have been hiring me to teach it and students who've taken the class in the past are checking in with their projects. So this blog posting is devoted to the String Star, an old-fashioned pattern in which the star points are usually sewn over paper and scraps of odd fabrics were used to good advantage in a casual crazy quilt style.

That doesn't mean all String Star quilts are antique-y looking--far from it! The pattern seems to be adaptable to almost any style or color scheme. Here's the first one in my collection--an Eight-Point String Star quilt from here in North Carolina. Found at a junque shop in Vanceboro, the back of this beauty is splashed with large globs of white paint. That probably indicates someone used it as a drop cloth and the only good sense they showed was to turn the quilt over. The quilt has both wool and cotton patches and dates from around 1930.

I bought another String Star quilt from an online auction. This one was from the state of Georgia and the block was simplified to four big honking points. The blocks are about 18" square but what intrigued me was the dark vs. light interplay when both brown and gold became backgrounds across each star. Notice the huge black quilting stitches--must have been made in a hurry.
                                                                                                                                      

The Georgia String Star begat a wall hanging and here's the corner of that descendant but I got a hankering to do a big quilt. So black and white got into the act-again-and the piece below is still being hand-quilted. In the String Star class this is the large sample quilt that students see since I have no shame and drag around half-done quilts all the time.

In January of 2009 I was lucky enough to be asked to teach a multi-day workshop in Venice, Florida and the quilt class they chose was the Easy String Star. Here's a link to the first blog post I wrote on that subject http://peppercory.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html .







Now another student from that Florida class has checked in and I thought you'd enjoy seeing the beautiful work of Cathy Modjeski.

         Mind you, no grades were given but don't you think this beauty deserves an A+?