Strips and Stars

Yes, I meant to say strips, not stripes. I haven't started on the stripes yet. But today, I got all my block borders done for the Stars & Stripes quilt I'm making from bee blocks collected last summer. It turned out so much better than expected.

I had in mind to border all the blocks with a brick red solid left over from the Quilting Snowladies. And so I made one block to see how I liked it.

Nice! The stars are fussy cut from one of my other fabrics.

Only then I realized that I'd miscalculated how many of those strips and stars I was going to need. I was thinking in terms of sashings. In other words, I'd need 20 strips and 20 stars. Only, think again, Genius, because I was doing all four sides of each block. That meant that I needed 48 strips and 48 stars. And, uh-oh, because I didn't have enough red for that. 

That's okay though, because the Quilting Snowladies also left behind a blue solid. I did half the blocks with red strips and half with blue strips. Here's how they look with blue.

My excellent Helper Cat was with me throughout the afternoon, and you can't even imagine how helpful he was.

Except when he wasn't.

When all the blocks were finished, I laid them out like this.

Not bad, eh?

By that time, I was getting kind of tired of sewing. Tomorrow, I'll work on the sashings and cornerstones. I'm going to use the stripes for the sashing and the small star fabric for cornerstones.

When the blocks are sashed all the way around, the quilt should be about 60 x 80 inches. That's probably big enough, and so I'm not planning to put a border on it. I'll use that same small star fabric for my binding.

Also this morning, I got off to a good start on the fifth block for the Hocuspocusville quilt. Right now I'm working my way up the staircase.

And that was my day of sewing. I haven't had a good full day of sewing for several days, and so it was a nice way to spend an otherwise dreary Saturday.