Originally Posted by
dunster
If you look again at the quilt you want to copy, you will see that there are no square blocks, so no waste by cutting down the diamonds. You have the diamonds in your example placed the wrong way and are using too many of them. Remove the ones at the 4 corners, take out one at top and bottom and place the remaining two the other way, and you will have a block. I would also do the set-in seams. They're not that hard when you practice a bit, and they do look nicer IMHO than having a seam running through the patch.
Yes! THANK YOU! The example picture I used with all the white diamonds (18 of them. FREAKING 18!) was from the tutorial I was following online that I ended up getting extremely mad at and abandoning. I KNEW there was a way to piece this quilt without wasting so many freaking white diamonds.
Frankly, if I can get the design to look exactly like the picture, that would be ideal. Am I going to be better off piecing these white diamonds into hexagons by hand? I know that they "tumble" into another block, so I guess I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around how this is supposed to come together, unless I do it literally one star at a time...?
I don't really want to sew a diamond into each nook of my star to complete the block, do I? That's going to change the overall look of the quilt and have more white space than I was hoping for. I realize that I'm going to have some waste at the bottom of the quilt by making half stars, which I'm fine with, but for someone who's never done a "tumbling" quilt or block before, I'm not sure how to piece this together. Should I just do all of my stars first, then lay them out how I want them, and start piecing them together with my white space and my Y seams?