Stars and Stripes from Leftovers
When I finished piecing this UFO at the end of 2024…

I had these pieces leftover:

There were quite a few of them, and they aren’t in colors and patterns I use very often, so I decided to experiment with turning them all into a wallhanging.
Since it’s patriotic colors, and they were already in stripes, I decided to play around with the pieces and see if I could make a flag quilt.
I have always used graph paper for all my quilt designs, but lately I have been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator. So I created a file that contained representations of all the pieces, and played with them until I decided on something that used them all up.

I did have to piece these additional stars.

I was glad for the equation on my free downloadable HST chart as each HST is 1.5″, which is not a standard size. By using the equation I was able to piece these stars so they will fit with the stripes.
Next step was to cut out all the pieces for the ‘background’. I divided the design up on my printout to ensure I didn’t have any weird seams.

After I cut all the background pieces I laid everything out:

As I pieced, I made numerous notes and corrections…reminding me why designing quilts and making good clear patterns is such a challenge (one I love, but still a challenge).

Putting all the pieces in the right place was quite the project. Since I only have a black and white printer, I used both my highly scribbled upon piece of paper plus the color version on my iPad to guide me.

But it slowly came together.

Since the leftover pieces were often the ones that were cast aside because they weren’t quite perfect, I ran into lots of instances where I needed to make trimming decisions. If I’d tried to make things fit to plan I would not have had a flat top.

But I used my patience to push on…

And was finally done. After cutting binding strips I had very little fabric to absorb into my stash.

It’s not the flattest quilt top I’ve ever made, but considering all the gyrations I went through I’m pleased. It was a fun challenge and I learned a lot about how to plan something like this.
Including the fact that the piecing part (not including all the design prep work) took a full 12 hours over 4 days.
It also will provide a great opportunity for some fun custom quilting on all that background blue.
It may be a bit before I quilt it as I have a backlog of practice tops to longarm first. But as I work on my longarming skills, I’ll do a lot of playing, again on my iPad, to decide on a quilting plan.
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