Antebellum Album - Friendship Star

This block was a bit of a challenge for me but I persevered and I think it turned out pretty darn good!

The patterns for the Antebellum Album quilt were provided by Barbara Brackman as a BOM in 2018 and can be found here. (After visiting Barbara's blog just now to add the link I looked at the block again on her blog and I see it looks slightly different than my block. I have reversed the light and dark placement of my star points.)

I printed out the templates with help from my husband and I cut all of the fabric pieces required and then I set to work to sew them all together.

That is where I started having problems. It had nothing to do with the block - it was all about my skill or should I say lack thereof. :)

There are a lot of inset seams in this block and I was doing great until I needed to add the center hexagon and that is where things went awry. I was trying to machine stitch the whole block but I couldn't make it work so I took out the stitches and then thought about how I was going to complete it.

One problem I had was after adding the corner squares the block was looking a bit rippled and that certainly didn't help things. I was able to tame it by spritzing it with water and carefully pressing it and that did the job of straightening it out. I decided the best way for me to complete the block was to applique the center hexagon onto the block and be done with it.

That worked much better for me. :)  My block ended up just barely shy of  12.5" - perfect in my books!