Did you ever have one of those days? Or Weeks?

This week I've had little success in quilting.  Here's my slow progress on Barbara Brackman's block of the week (Link here).  They are working on block #32, and I'm stuck on block #29.  It's a star with seven points, and the first one I machine pieced was like a little bowl.  :(  I discovered that the star points had a different angle on each end, and it mattered which ends you used as the center of the star.....o.k.  progress made - won't make that mistake again.  So Mr. Seamripper and I took it apart, and re-machine sewed it.  Now the star does lay flat, but the center where all the star point seams meet is a hot mess, with a hole, and it's in the wastebasket.  Here's the wastebasket, with the poor fallen star in it.

This is my third attempt at it.  I've machine basted around each star section, and am going to hand piece the center of the star together, forcing those points to meet and greet each other.  If successful, I'll applique the outer points to the background.

The quilt that I kitted up into thirty plastic bags, has a little progress too.  Again, it was slow and painful, but it's progress.  I made one block, and it didn't measure 13.5 inches when completed, as it should have.  I made another one, and watched my seam allowances carefully.  Better results, but not satisfactory yet.  I then taped together four pieces of graph paper, and made a big pattern of the block - with all the seams right where they should be....but in pencil on paper.  I took it to the copy store, and made five copies, intending to paper piece my way through five blocks.   I made one more attempt without resorting to paper piecing, and measured each round against the paper pattern.  It worked, and I found that correctly cutting off the ends of each round at the correct angle was the key.  One block finished, and it measured 13.5 inches!  

I didn't want to paper piece mainly because the copies were $0.50 each, and I didn't want to pay for 30 of them, plus do all that paper ripping.  So next, I measured the first two blocks, Mr. Seamripper and I did some adjustments, and now there are three blocks on the design wall.  Here's my design wall picture, and I'm linking with Judy Laquidara's Design Wall Mondays, for show and tell.  I love to see what others are working on each week.  (link here)

I have binding on one of the small quilts, and intend to take all three little quilts with me to finish at Shipshewana, IN.  This week is the Dear Jane quilt retreat! I am so ready to spend three days with all the other quilters there.  I always leave Shipshe with so much inspiration and so many new ideas, and as you can read, I'm very ready for some of that this week!