My friend Kathleen gave me a very small piece of this striped fabric, where the colors are just perfect for my quilt. The idea was to fussy cut the fabric to make interesting patterns with the stripes, but I was a little bit at the mercy of the stripe spacing.

Also, the piece I had was very small. It wasn’t a fat eighth … is a fat sixteenth a thing? It was about the size of a piece of printer paper.

The green fabric alternates cream dotted rows with red star rows. I carefully cut out the pieces for the X in the middle so that the stripes had only red stars. They were a little extra complicated to fussy cut, since that stripe had a repeat of three stars, some dots, one star, some more dots, and back to the three stars again (like morse code).

I used the cream dots for the set of stripes outlining the center diamond. They were much easier to cut out because there’s no fancy repeat for the cream dot stripe.

But I was stumped about what to do for those larger squares in the corners. I started out cutting squares that had three stars running down the middle, thinking that would look cool, and I could arrange them in a kind of pinwheel pattern around the center diamond.

The first square came out okay, but the second one had part of the cream dots stripe showing on one side after I sewed the red triangles around it. And it didn’t look intentional; it just looked like I was bad at fussy cutting.

So I went back to the drawing board. I toyed with having both a red and a cream stripe going across each square, but it looked kind of odd.

Finally, I decided I would just risk it and cut those squares on the bias. Now I have three red stars going diagonally across the square, and a cream dot in each of the opposite corners. It’s like it was meant to be placed that way.

The fussy cutting was pretty tricky (and by that time, I had very little of this striped fabric left), but I got it done. Then I had to gently pick out the stitches on the two squares I’d already done, so I could reuse the red triangle pieces.

And I had to sew oh-so-carefully since the new green squares were cut on the bias and I didn’t want them to get stretched out.

One of the squares ended up a tiny bit off (you can see part of a second cream dot at one edge of the square). But I didn’t really have enough fabric, or enough patience, to try a third time.

Leave it to me to choose a directional fabric that I had scarcely a sixteenth of a yard of for a block with 49 pieces. But I made it work, and am pretty pleased with the finished block.