Stars & Stripes Forever Resurrected

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Time sure is flying by! I can't believe it's already almost September! Things seem to be cooling off here. We've been having a lot of clouds and even a little rain. It sure feels good!

This week I resurrected an old project -- Stars & Strips Forever from Judy Martin's book Knockout Blocks and Sampler Quilts. This is another project that's been sitting around for years, waiting for me to have time to work on it. I started by putting together some of the blocks for the quilt.

Stars & Stripes Forever - Stripes Blocks

Stars & Stripes Forever - Star Blocks

The stripe blocks were quick and easy, but I spent most of the week on the star blocks. The trimming of the flying geese units took forever! Especially since I had to make 40 of these blocks! But I needed the star blocks for the middle of the quilt, so I had to power through. I had already made the large star blocks for the quilt center, so I started putting the center together. This quilt has a diagonal setting, so I put the large stars on the design wall and, when I was happy with the placement, I sewed them together in diagonal strips. Then I put the small star blocks on the design wall and sewed together pairs of them where I could. Finally, I cut the red triangles and put them on the design wall.

Stars & Strips Forever - Current Progress

My next step will be to sew all of these pieces together. Then I can start assembling the borders. This quilt has two borders - a pieced inner border and a plain outer border with pieced cornerstones. As usual, I'm loving it! I really love colors and fabrics so there are very few quilts that I'm not gushing about as I make them.

This week I was also able to finish my Kallara shawl designed by Ambah O'Brien.

Kallara

This shawl is long and skinny, so more like a scarf to me. It's a pretty basic shawl, but can be made fun by playing with the colors. My colors were very subtle.

Kallara - Close-Up

This will be a nice utility piece. It's entirely knit in garter stitch, so it's smushy and bouncy. It got a bit boring to knit since the pattern didn't change except for shaping stitches, so I was glad to get it finished.

Nancy