Good morning, starshine!

One of the projects I've most enjoyed working on this year is the Gwennie Inspired Medallion Quilt Along.  Each month has been a riot of fun, working with a new theme.
For August, we were given the stars!
Now I love stars.  There are so many kinds of stars blocks to make, and they're all beautiful.
But this made it a little bit hard to narrow down what kind of stars to make for my medallion borders.  How to choose, when I love them all?
I started with the obvious - maverick stars.

This is a form I haven't played with much, and I've always thought they looked like fun.  But they're harder to make than they look, and there's a lot of waste involved.   Since my medallion has gotten quite large, it would have taken a lot of these stars to make a border.
So, I kept playing.
I made other stars.

And still other stars.

And some more.

And more.

And I even remembered that I had some 4" sawtooth stars tucked away for a rainy day, so I pulled them out to play, too.

And there I was again, surrounded by blocks of all different sizes, and unable to choose between them.
You know where this is headed, right?
Yep, just like the sunflowers in the second round.  I decided to use all the kinds.
I started laying them out, and quickly decided that combining the stars with random vaguely-checkerboardish squares would be the best approach.

And I hit a wall around that point, as I mentioned in my last post, so I moved on to my smaller medallion while I waited (in vain, as it turned out) for the fabric fairy to deliver my stop border fabric.

I wanted to show these stars again, because they came about starting with seeing a block that Julie was playing with on her blog, and following her lead to Lynn Harris's Wind Farm from Every Last Piece.  I made a much simpler version, using a long triangle sewn as a flippy corner on a 2.5" pieced square.

There were half a dozen of them in various colors by the time I was done.  I really like the small spiky-ness of them.
I used a variety of stars and 1.5" strips to frame my smaller medallion quilt, and I'm quite happy with it.

This top now measures 36"x44", which is still a manageable size.  We'll see how big it ends up after the next stage.

So, with the smaller medallion done, and the clock ticking down to the end of the month, I went ahead and finished the larger one with the second choice stop border fabric.

Et voila!

I'm happy with my stars, and happy with my quilt-in-progress.  And it's a good thing, too, because it now stands at 64"x70" with a round still to go.  I really hadn't planned on making another bed-sized quilt this summer, but here it is!

And look what arrived in the mail late this afternoon -

The stripe is the one on the left.  It's a lot darker and purpler in real life; as usual I'm not good at getting purples to photograph true to color.  The other stripe is just because I'm trying to collect more stripes, and the jelly roll was their super-duper-daily-special with lots of batiks in purples and blues.  Because I'm a total sucker for batiks.  And purple...


So now I'm done with Phase Four of the QAL, and I'm rarin' to go on the next theme.  I'll be linking with Lori at Humble Quilts when the linky party goes live.  And then I'm going to go enjoy seeing what all the folks have been up to with their own starshine!  You all should come see, too!