Seeing Stars

So here's what's on my design wall this morning.  Yep, that's a whole lot of stars!

I've been sewing these for years. Well, actually, I started cutting up scraps for stars about 3 years ago.  I made a few, then got distracted (surprise!) and the box of parts moved to the back of my closet.

So it's been -- marinating, shall we say? -- for all of that time. And recently, in a mood to make a bit of a dent in the UFO list, and looking for some mindless thing to take to my April quilt retreat, I unearthed it.  I have to confess that it took an evening of sorting of parts and trying to make sense of  various scraps of paper. I knew I'd planned it all out -- all I had to do was decipher the plans!  But I finally did, and made a bunch of the blocks on retreat.  Since then, I've had a few star sewing sessions and recently finished them up. 

I am looking forward to sewing them together and getting it quilted. Just in time for the Fourth of July!

What started me down this starry road was stumbling onto blog quilt-along some years back, called "Oh My Stars!" Sheila's blog, thoughtandfound.wordpress.com, looks like it's been on a long hiatus -- but if you like stars and want to get good tutorials for a bunch of different types, click on the link.  She has really good instructions.  The original Oh My Stars quilt had different types of stars, and her blog provides directions for all of them. 

Me, though, I just wanted to use up red and blue scraps, so I figured simple was the way to go.  I stuck with three sizes of sawtooth stars. I had so many scraps leftover from making this quilt, ages ago.

Looking for a photo of that quilt reminded me that I made another red and blue quilt a few years ago too.

 Apparently I now have a patriotic quilt collection and didn't even know it.

You'd think I'd have made a huge dent in the red fabrics in my stash, wouldn't you?  But, um... no. I still have loads.  But I think I'm done with stars for the time being.