Piecing an eight-point star

I’ve been playing around with eight-pointed stars lately. The best tutorial videos I’ve found on the subject are done by Edyta Sitar and the Fat Quarter Shop. She shows some great methods for getting all the points aligned just right. I made this 32-piece one following some, but not all, of her advice. I was working with odd-shaped scraps of fabric, so wasn’t able to cut the pieces out from a long strip of fabric. Instead, I cut them out using a template. Here’s the order in which I sewed everything together:

8-pointed star assembly
I sewed sets of two diamonds together, then pinned two sets together. (I know it’s hard to tell what’s going on in this photo, but I liked the pattern the center diamonds formed here when I was assembling it.)
8-pointed star assembly

The result was eight diamonds.
8-pointed star assembly
I assembled those into halves.
8-pointed star (32 piece)
I sewed the two pieces together, ironed the edges over, and appliquéd the star to a blanket I’ve been touching up after Lilo got to it. (I’ll have more photos of the blanket when I can get it into some natural light.)

If you look closely, you can see that the center corners don’t match up. That’s because the pieces were all slightly different sizes — I’m terrible at template cutting and should stick to a ruler and angle when I want to cut accurately. Obviously I didn’t care so much about it that I was going to tear apart all the seams and redo it. So instead I decided to line up the two halves at the outer edges of the dark diamonds, since having it askew at a point where the color shifts from dark to light would have been more noticeable than having the star askew at the center, where all the fabric matches.

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