A couple of weeks ago, I shared a sketch that used an eight-pointed star on point (as one of two blocks in the design). I liked it enough to pull it out and feature it on its own.

As I wrote in the blog post for Sunday sketch #449, I don’t always love the eight-pointed star on point; it’s one of my favourite star blocks, but I feel like it loses its ‘starriness’ when its rotated. It ends up feeling more like a cross to me (like a Maltese cross, iron cross or cross pattée).

So I decided to lean into the crossiness (yes I made up that word) by tweaking the block a little. I added some more angles and then coloured them in as a background to each star/cross. They help to create new secondary shapes (octagons, squares) in the background between the blocks.

I like using the background as the centre colour here, with only the black cross ‘shadows’ bringing consistency across the design. The diagonal lines created by the usually horizontal/vertical lines of the eight-pointed stars really stand out and draw the eye around the whole design.

I’m loving a multicolour palette lately, but this design can be pared back to fewer colours too – here it is in four colours.

   

(Those secondary shapes can be coloured in, but I feel like this approach makes the design a little less interesting. Secondary shapes are often best left undisturbed.)

    

Pare the palette back even further, and just use two colours…

   

   

I love the impact of the two-colour versions, although they’re missing some of the movement in the other versions. Keeping the centre squares ’empty’ (that is, the same colour as the background) is only possible with a palette of three or more colours.

Making one of these sketches into a quilt would be a little more difficult than making a quilt with standard eight-pointed stars; you’d probably need to use paper-piecing to get the second layer of angles behind the original star. But I think you’d need only two templates: one for the four corners of the block (which are just squares in a standard eight-pointed star block) and one for the star arms (which are normally triangle-in-a-square units). And then some squares for the middle of the block. Thinking through the assembly is almost always the point at which I think “I should try it and see…..” 🙂