I did actually take these pictures yesterday, but never got around to actually posting.

A few weeks (months?) ago, a friend was clearing out some UFOs, and for some unknown reason, I volunteered to take on a feathered star project that she was frustrated with.

Warning, if you aren’t a quilter, this will probably make your eyes cross….

The problem was that the centers of the feathered stars were not the right size:  the pattern pieces were wrong.    I would like to emphasize that my friend wasn’t at fault:  the pattern was….

I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do about it, until Tuesday, when I decided to try drafting my own center.  I have CorelDraw, I’m not afraid to use it…LOL…

I even decided to try to figure out how to paper-piece the darned thing. Yes, it is a complete circle, and yes, the last seam doesn’t actually get paper-pieced, but it did work, technically.  The circle is the correct size and it all fit together nicely.

However:

I did one on Tuesday:

Ugh.  It looks horrible.  It’s a long story, but I thought that the cream I was using was the same as what was in the feathered star points.  Well, it is, just not in the star points of this particular star.  And even if it had matched the star points, it would have still looked awful.
So,  on Wednesday.  Trying again, using the cream fabric that makes up all of the large backgrounds — it’s a darker cream, and I thought it ought to do the trick.

Double Ugh.  This time, though, the pieces are just pinned there, not actually sewn in.  I still have to unsew yesterday’s fiasco.

Don’t like that either.  I don’t have any of the toile she used in the large star points, but I do have a different black and cream toile that I could try.
Or:  I was wondering this morning about actually reversing the black and cream.  Although, now that I contemplate it, that might be too much black.  Maybe instead of the tone-on-tone blacks, I should be using the more black and white prints that she used for the half square triangles around the star points?

It may be that it isn’t just the starkness of the cream that I don’t like, it may be that it the black is too much as well.

This wouldn’t be so frustrating if it didn’t take so long to make the starburst circles to begin with.  Each one has 32 pieces and paper piecing seems to take forever….

If anyone is counting, I now have her 4 center starbursts that are too small, plus 2 of my own that are the right size but look terrible on this quilt.  I’ll have to figure out what to do with all of those, too…..

So, that’s my report from yesterday.  I also spent time unsewing some stitching from a quilt that is on the frame.  Hopefully I’ll have a progress report about that quilt later today.

TTFN-