SAHRR - Round 3 - Stars!

 My second finish of the day was getting my SAHRR round 3 finished.  The cold I had this week slowed me down a bit, but I had a happy discovery that enabled me to get to this goal much faster than I would have otherwise!  I felt like it deserved it's own post, so here goes:

This week's prompt was stars, and I happen to love Friendship stars.  I thought they would be nice to add a little twinkle to this border.  The tricky thing about Round Robin quilts is that as you add rows, sometimes you have to deal with measurements that don't break up into the correct increment for the design you want to use.  This row was a little short of being able to add a center block, but instead of adding a small border to bring it up to size, I thought it would look nice to just put background fabric in the gap.

In fact, I thought about just adding blocks to two corners, but I decided that I preferred to keep my design symmetrical.  I realized that I needed 25 friendship star blocks for the border I wanted to do - that's a lot of half square triangles to make.  Here is where the good fortune comes in!  As I was looking for fabric for the triangles, I found a bin with many more triangles than I needed!  At some point I was planning to make a basket quilt in purple and started to make half square triangles with all of my purple scraps from Island Batik and my Accuquilt cutter.  What a fortunate discovery, and they were the perfect size for my blocks!  There was enough scrap of the background fabric I used for my row as well, I just had to pick out a yellow for the centers.

Truthfully, I like my quilt much better now that this border is on it.  I think it definitely improves the look of it!  Plus I've rooted out another UFO!  I think that I am going to change my plans, though.  I don't think I'll make a basket quilt from the rest of my triangles.  Maybe a medallion of baskets, and the rest of the triangles in borders around them.  We'll see!

Let's see what the next week will bring for this project - so far it measures 40 inches square!  These Round Robins start getting big after a few rows - not sure how big I want this to get, but we'll see.  As you can see, I managed to beat the sunset for this picture, but not by much!  Just happy to have had a dry day to take a picture outdoors in better lighting!

p.s. I've tweaked a few settings on my blog, so hope to be able to respond to comments once more.  I have missed out on being able to do that over the past month!