Salad bowl with eight point stars
 

I am attempting to sew a series of complex eight-point stars from a book by Jinny Beyer. Each block has about 60 pieces. I am working very meticulously with accurate templates, marking the corners, pinning, watching my 1/4 inch seam and everything else I can think of to prevent problems. Everything seems to work/lie flat and go together perfectly until the last unit, at which point I sew on the final unit and the whole block poofs up into the shape of a salad bowl.

I have been taking the blocks to a sewing class and the teachers think I am doing everything correctly but we can't figure out what is going wrong.

Does anyone have experience with these salad bowls forming on 8 pt star blocks?

What can I do to prevent this happening AND what can I do at this point to fix it? Can I block the stars at this point to press out the bulge?

Thanks for any input,

Lainey

Sew from the center out

Starch heavily

Yes, I sewed from the center out.

Apparently if I could have sewn one half and then the other half and sewn the two halves together it would have prevented this, but the block patterns would not allow that. So I started with the central star and then set in all the succeeding stars until I got to the outside.

Jenny Beyer never uses a machine to sew and hand sewing makes the unit much more relaxed. If you are not hand sewing then maybe hand sewing the last unit will help. I never attempt her patterns by machine, there are always problems with tension on the fabric when machine stitching the units.

Here's a post that I bookmarked. She really had the opposite problem, the segments were too small, but there are lots of ideas about getting the pieces to fit. Might find something in here that helps
http://www.quiltingboard.com/main-f1...ng-t99549.html

OK, thank you, these are all helpful comments.

I am trying to determine what if anything can be done to correct the central stars I have now. I am sending photos, not sure if this will convey the issue.

Basically there is bagging and bunching in those central stars, which was NOT there until I set in the final pieces around the perimeters. It's like finishing the perimeter caused the central star to buckle. So is there any recourse now? I have blocked these to get them to lie somewhat flat...

Here are both blocks followed by the centers.

Block one:

Block two:

Bunching after attaching the edges says to me that the angles on the edges were slightly smaller than the spaces they were filling. I try unstitching the last pieces, and taking the seam allowance on a *very slight* angle. In fact, you could unstitch just one side of the last piece, lay the whole block flat (assuming it's still flat at this point. Then you can actually mark where the seam allowance on each piece should be (ie, where the 2 sections overlap) and restitch.

Are you talking at the straight borders causing the bunching? That would surprise me and I don't know how that could happen. But I'd do the same thing. Unstitch, lay it out, and adjust seam allowances to make it fit better.

They are gorgeous blocks. I hope you figure it out.

Oh, by the way - restitching the center is a theoretical option too - just carefull unpick the very center of the star and restitch those areas to adjust for the bulk.