Giant Star in Progress

My friend Jen of Glinda Quilts recently posted about a soldier's quilt which needed a home.  (It doesn't any more.)  It got me thinking about servicemen that I know.  After thinking about it for a couple days, I decided that I wanted to make a quilt for my friend whose husband is in the service. 

I looked at the blues left over from my month of blue, and realized that I didn't have any navy blue fabric left. 

So I went to bed.  However, the thought of making her a quilt would not go away.  So I went back to my stash and decided to make a bright blue and red quilt.  I had plenty of fabric for that.  ;)  I wanted to make it quickly and decided to stick with a simple pattern.  I had made a giant star quilt (mentioned here) earlier, and decided to make another one.  It uses Jeni's Giant Star Quilt Tutorial. 

I cut my squares out at 18 inches for the half square triangles, and trimmed them to 17.5 inches square.  To do this I used the lines on my large cutting mat. 

I don't use the lines on my cutting mat very often, because I don't think it is super accurate.  However, I used what I had for something this large.  (Although the 21" square ruler from Omnigrip is on my wish list.) 

It was accurate enough for my center point to look like this.  :)

I was able to get the entire top laid out on my design wall in less than two hours. 

Then I decided to make a smaller one for myself out of the scraps.  I cut these squares at 6 inches. 

It is crazy how much smaller it is cutting the squares at on third the original size.  The bigger one finishes at 68 inches, and the smaller one finishes at 20 inches. 

I ate lunch with the munchkins, and decided to add borders to both quilts.  I added a 2 inch border of the cream star fabric all around the large star, and a 1 inch border of the cream star fabric all around the small star.  I kept the smaller one square by adding side borders with cornerstones.  Then I added borders to two sides of the large one to make it a rectangle.  I love large rectangular quilts.  I pieced the backing with fabric from my stash and got them basted.  It took a day and a half.  Then I had them quilted and bound after another day and a half of working on them.

 
My next post will have more pictures of the finished quilts, because they are already done. 

XX,
Jasmine