A Bit of Star Value

In my happy wanderings around blogland one day I came across this  tutorial by Melissa at Happy Quilting.  I liked the look of it so I printed it out and set it aside on the 'one day' pile and a surprisingly short time later I picked it up again.  I had a bit of spare time at the end of last month having been a smarty pants and finished all my projects for that month so I had a bit of an archaeological dig in my scraps to see if I could make a block or two.  I chose the 12" block option as I figured I had a lot of 2" scrap squares already cut to choose from and quite a few charm squares I could cut into 4. Easy peasy I thought!

First problem was a distinct lack of grey fabrics, and when I say lack of I really mean total absence.  Luckily Spotlight helped me out by having a stocktake sale at just the right time so I popped down and picked out a couple of fat quarters and a couple of bolts of French themed greys.  The best bit was finding out when I got to the cutting table that the bolts I had picked (which showed as $12.95 per metre) ended up at $4 per metre!  Now that's my price range - so a metre of each came home with me to help with the grey hole in my stash!

While the blocks aren't really difficult, they are time consuming I found but I love the way they look!

I wanted to use scraps I had so I mixed whites with low value creams (they really aren't quite as dark as they appear in this photo).  I do think it would look better with just white for contrast though.

A wiser soul than myself would have cleverly made the larger option (cutting instructions are given for 5 different sized blocks up to 28"!) but the reward is the pattern which appears when you put the blocks together.  I figured the smaller the blocks, the more pattern you get.  Here are my 4 blocks all together:

Thanks Melissa for sharing a great tutorial.  I'm putting these away for a little bit until the next time I have a combination of free time and plenty of scraps.  It won't be a quilt I'll finish in a hurry but I'm looking forward to seeing it come together eventually!

Thanks for visiting!