How do you fill a star?

Quilt as desired. Those famous words that appear at the end of soooo many patterns. I love a pattern that gives a suggestion...you know, those black dashed lines that they overlay onto a photo of the quilt in the pattern pictures? But what about the patterns that don't come with instructions?

Or, what if you don't feel like doing what another quilter did? How do you decide what you desire to quilt?

For me, I generally think about the quilt and something will come to me. Wind for pinwheel quilts. Flowers for flowery fabrics. Leaves for autumn themed quilts. For the storytime stars quilt, it was fire. Stars are balls of fire in the heavens, so what better to quilt into a star than fire. But, how?

I put my little noggin' to work and I thought about fire and how I could fit fire into these blocks. First, it had to start from the center and then it had to fill a square and then it had to radiate beyond that into the star points.

I sat down last night with a pencil and started drawing what I was seeing in my mind. I was reading blogs yesterday and I saw where Tammy had drawn a fern frond around 80 times. I was inspired. If I could draw it on paper, I could figure out anything about it that was going to be difficult and I could plan around that. And, worse come to worse, I could use my drawing as a master and mark the quilt with fire if I had to. Fortunately, I didn't have to.



I folded my paper to give me 4 squares that were just a bit larger than the squares in the quilt and I drew. And, when I had drawn 4 on one side, I flipped the paper over and drew 4 more.



I was all ready when I sat down to do the first one this morning and it went really fast,



And, I did another.

While these pictures were uploading, I did two more. So, that's a quarter of them done in just a few minutes.

Okay, that ain't right. I spent way more time thinking about how to do this than it's actually going to take to do it. At this rate, I will have spent two weeks figuring out how to do two hours of quilting. But, never fear. Since this is going so fast, I have time to try something fun in the sashing. Now, what do I desire there?

There's something about having the courage to try something new; to see it, then draw it, then make it come out of the machine. If you've read my ramblings for long, then you know I'm not afraid to try something, hate it, rip it out and then try something else. But, I'm still always surprised when I sweat over something for a long time and then it happens really easy.

It's when I try to force myself to hurry that it all goes wrong.

Everybody have a great Tuesday. Lane