Stars With Pizazz

I have been working my way through the blocks in the pattern my First Thursday Piecers group has been doing, but I was getting bored with the blocks.  Part of that is my usual reluctance to do "someone else's work" and part is due to my desire to be challenged.  So I got out my EQ7 program (which doesn't need the internet to work once it's set up) and created some new stars.

This block was inspired by a quilt I saw at Quilt Expo last week.  Of course, I had to make it different for me.

This block is one I saw in the latest issue of Quilter's Newsletter called "Double Windmill."  I recreated it in EQ because then I could play with it in my virtual quilts.  Also, I wanted to do different colors and values than they did.  That was easy to do once I had it in my virtual sketchbook.

You can get directions for it here.  Apparently it's in the block library, but I didn't really look for it -- I was having too much fun trying to create it in Patch Draw.

This feathered star was in the block library, but I added the little rays in the background areas.  I'm not afraid of set-in or partial seams, but this was a nightmare to sew together.    I pretty much used the directions in this book (click here), but Marsha McCloskey must not be a smarty pants.  All of her stars have half-square triangles here where the little green squares are, which makes piecing them much easier.  Oh well, I wanted a challenge.

This was the first of the virtual quilts I made.  I put the feathered star in the middle to showcase it, but I think it's too, um, feathery.  It's too light for the middle --it looks insubstantial there.  I haven't made the star that's in the four corners yet.  It's next on my agenda.

Once I had them created in EQ, it was easy to make up a bunch of quilts.  I would never make these in real life because I would never want to make more than one of a block.  But it's fun to play.  I really like the secondary pattern the rays create here.

This is more of a sampler -- but it still has four of each of the new stars.  I like the way that EQ allowed me to use part of the star in the triangles on the edges.  I think I still need to add a couple of borders on this one.