Welcome to the August installment of my Barn Quilt Block of the Month project! This is a personal challenge I decided to give myself in 2017 to keep pushing my pattern-making skills and add to my overall quilting abilities. Each month I’ll pick a cool barn quilt, turn it into an actual block, write up a pattern, and list it in my Craftsy shop.
My inspiration this month was this barn quilt in Washington County, Iowa. Based on that photo, I had already started calling this the Corn Cob Star in my head…when some further digging revealed that this is actually a very well known traditional block called Crazy Ann. In fact, there’s even one in the Gypsy Wife quilt I’ve recently started — I just hadn’t gotten to that block yet!
The Iowa barn quilt features a slight twist on the traditional design that I found on many other quilting sites, and I loved it so much that I had to keep the feature. The white/yellow units in my block are usually single triangles units. But by dividing that solid triangle into two, the block gains a wonderful pinwheel effect behind the center star shape.
Get the Crazy Ann Block pattern here!
This block is paper pieced, the pattern has templates for a 12″ block, and it’s only $2! I don’t include paper piecing instructions in the pattern, but there are plenty of great resources online to help you. One of my favorites is the paper piecing tutorial at Blossom Heart Quilts.
Four more to go!
The coloration you used for the block is so summery and I can see why you were calling it the Corn Cob Star! Lovely!