The last star to fade in the night sky

Have you ever noticed that, whilst you can often see the moon during the day, you can't see many stars (other than our Sun of course)? 

The final star in my Starlight, Starbright quilt has been pieced and is now ready to go into the final design.

I still have the setting squares to cut and piece and then the top to put together. But I think the bulk of the work is done.

Although there are only a few stars in Carol Doak's foundation paper pieced design, each one takes a fair while. Particularly when you mis-sew a piece like I did. Oops. 

I particularly like the black in this block; I think it frames the star well and gives the eye a place to rest in the otherwise busy block. Which sort of reminds me of New York Beauty.

No way can I class this quilt as "done" but perhaps as progress made?

Idiot:1 Common Sense:0

You know the phrase "idiot-proof"? Have you ever wondered which idiot tested the item/theory and was defeated by it?

Foundation paper piecing is meant to be idiot-proof. And then it met me. 

This is the fourth eighth of an eight piece block - four As and four Bs. 

This is the final A piece. See that pink piece in the middle? Its piece 1, around which all other pieces then fit. 

See that black line about 1/4" away from the right hand edge of the pink piece? Yep, the pink piece is meant to cover that. oops.

I can understand misaligning the pink piece to start with - maybe I lined it up wrong, maybe I trimmed it wrong.

What I can't figure out is how I then pieced 11 more pieces around it and didn't notice the error! 

It's an easy fix, I just need to reprint the foundation and recut some scraps. But still, this is meant to be easy. Focus woman!

Finish it up Fridays

Ah ha! For once, I'm on time for Finish It Up Friday's! Miraculous.

This week I have finished the four twinkle stars from Carol Doak's  Craftsy class. This is the finished quilt

The process for piecing the stars is fairly straight forward and methodical - sew, press, trim, repeat. With four stars to make, there were 32 individual sections to make and then sew together into 16 quarters, 8 halves and finally 4 blocks.

Carol's method of sewing the component parts together requires you to sew each seam at least twice - once to tack it in place and check your points and then a second time to actually sew the seam. If any of your points are off at the tacking stage, you can quickly unpick and retack to fix the problem. In reality I found myself tacking some points numerous times which was time consuming although admittedly not as annoying as having to unpick and resew the whole seam over and over would have been. It did cause me to create a lot of thread waste though as I unpicked numerous seams

Those perfect points came at a price! But they are beautiful. Each of the future stars only appears once so hopefully I won't have the same issue again.