Rising Stars for June & July

The quilt designer for this Mystery BOM quilt calls it 'Falling Stars' and I re-named it Rising Stars. It will still be a 12-block quilt with various star patterns no matter what I call it.

I got behind on it because I wanted to finish the Blue & White Log Cabin quilt which I named Not All Who Wander which is a reference in 'Lord of the Rings' and continues the sentence "...are lost". I will send the young man a letter explaining my choices. 

Any way, the quilts and UFO's took up my time & I chose to let these two blocks wait until the quilts were finished and ready to ship. 

I selected fabrics for both, cut the pieces, most of which will be HST (half square triangles), which I hate. I marked all for both blocks, loaded some light thread in the bobbins & got ready to sew lines. They were cut between the lines, pressed open, need to be trimmed & laid out for the block pattern, pinned, sewn, & pressed until the block is finished. While I am chain stitching these HSTs, the blocks will be made one at a time. I hate the HST because it challenges me and I need to take my time with them.

Hate is such a strong word. In truth, it is my own ineptness with HSTs, and how frustrated I get with myself when one or more of them do not turn out. This new way of making them must have been designed because I was not the only one with this issue. We make them over-sized and trimmed down. The waste of fabric is less than the emotional and mental cost of frustration, and time it took to re-do them. I was not the only one.