The "Brick Road" mini quilt kit (from Temecula Quilt Company) was part of the "Monthly Minis" subscription from 2016. There are a couple of wobbles if you look closely, but I'm pleased with my piecing on this one! I made my first cutting mistake here, unfortunately for me on one of the few kits that had little extra fabric, and so I would have had to piece a strip, but I decided to use a little bit of the border/binding fabric instead, since I'm not going to bind these individually.
"Bathwick," using prints from Karen Styles's "Bathwick" collection, these from 2018 so not too long ago. I chose this kit partly because it's pretty but partly because I have a half-yard or so of that fussy-cut print in my half-square triangles quilt that I'm this close to finishing, which amused me greatly! The kit came with that particular piece larger than the rest, so that it could be fussy-cut, a nice touch. I made a slight cutting mistake -- well, not really a mistake, but I changed my mind literally as the rotary cutter was whisking across the fabric, that instead I should just make the border strips as wide as the fabric allowed, instead of trimming them to 2" -- and so one of them is a smidge narrower than the others!
The "Little Stars" kit was immediately my favorite, but I also knew that it would be the most fiddly, with those star points, and so I left it for last. It is also, unfortunately, the one at which I was least successful -- the stars are sometimes more "wonky" than they should be, and as you can probably see, some of the blocks were not especially amenable to lining up with the ones next to them. As much as I've taken to heart the maxim, "People will never know how long it took you, but they will see how well you did it!" I wanted to pick out as few as possible of any wobbly seams because the pieces are so small -- I was afraid they would stretch or fray so badly that nothing would go right -- though I did pick out the howlers on this one. Well, it's a learning experience, and yesterday evening I spent a rewarding hour gathering tips for more-accurate piecing which I will use in future!
I was pleased, though, with my figuring out how to get the strongly-directional fabric of that pale-pink star to have the lines all radiating outwards, instead of some outwards and some across (like the less-obviously-directional fabric of the star in the upper left corner), which is what happens when you cut the triangles from squares in which the lines all run in the same direction.
This is, by the way, apparently the "traditional" way of assembling a sawtooth star block, cutting out each piece individually. There are two other methods that I know of now, which are a bit less risky where that unsupported bias edge is concerned, for one -- but I thought I should try it this way, to see for myself. Personally, I don't think I will cut individual pieces this way again, unless I'm doing English piecing! certainly not on pieces this small!
Here is something like my idea for putting these six pieces together, here laid out on my "Medallion Variations" quilt which is about the size I'd like this one to be -- blue though, navy blue perhaps, instead of purple! I have enough scraps to piece together a good-sized frame or border for the sides at least, with luck for the whole thing --
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