Free Quilt Pattern: Diamond Jewel Star Quilt

In my previous post, I mentioned my recent EPP craze. Well, it's finally time for me to share what I was working on! I was looking for away to use up some miscellaneous scraps while having some chill time to watch TV with the hubs. EPP rocks both those criteria thankfully.  I started off aimlessly making simple jewel stars with fussy cut hexie centers, and the project evolved into this cool diamond-shaped quilt!

Because I was aiming to use up scraps, I used the entire rainbow for my palette. For each star, I would pick two prints in a single color for the star points. I think it adds some extra interest. 

My individual jewel stars aren't very big. The hexies' sides are only .75" long. If you use the same size shapes provided in the templates at the end of the post, the finished quilt measures approximately 55" long and 32" wide.

For the outer border, I arranged my pieces in rainbow order to tie everything together.

As for finishing, I'll admit my impatience got the best of me. Instead of making a quilt sandwich and machine quilting, I bagged out the whole thing. I didn't baste the layers very well, so machine quilting it afterwards would have just turned it into a wrinkled mess. My solution was to stitch around the border to imitate the look of machine binding, then hand die the rest where the stars points met. 

To make one diamond, you will need:

• (36) Fussy cut hexies
• (180) Jewels (six for each star)
• (131) Low volume diamonds
• (28) Low volume triangles
• (40) Border triangles
• (40) Border trapazoids

**Click here to download the templates.** Print at 100% if you want your quilt to be the same size as mine, or scale as desired. Follow your EPP tutorial of choice (I like the one from Sometimes Crafter) to baste your shapes with thread or glue, and assemble following the diagram below.

Follow the diagram to piece together your quilt!

I plan on using mine as a table runner, but it's such a versatile piece. If I wasn't so afraid of applique, I might have applique it onto a low-volume background. My friend Becca of Bryan House Quilts also suggested making six of these diamonds and turning them into one giant star! 

Make six diamonds for an epic star!