Still Sewing Stars

Over the past week I've devoted any stitching time to the Twilight Hopscotch pieces and parts. I work on batches of parts to build the stars and try to leave something ready to sew before I shut down the sewing room for the night. This is a quilt by Kim Diehl from her Simple Comforts book.

The pile has grown over the week, though I ran out of the double four patch blocks to finish this last one of the original number of blocks per the pattern. I want to make the lap quilt a bit bigger and need to make more blocks.  Initially I thought of adding two additional rows  both across and vertically, but likely will not have enough of the star  fabric for that many.  If I can make two more rows across (8 more stars), the quilt would finish in the 60x80 range.  I really do prefer rectangular quilts. 

Lots of pieces and subunits have meant more room for mistakes.  My seam ripper has been busy near nightly!  Only one block got discarded as the trimming of the background behind the flip-and-sew corners made the seam allowance too narrow to salvage.  

Otherwise we are preparing for a couple of events in the family, including our son's wedding and our older daughter and son-in-law moving halfway across town in the near future.  Our grandsons will be sharing a room at their new address but still have a playroom until they outgrow that.  Meanwhile, Grant and I have been looking at houses and contemplating putting our place on the market. The idea of moving after nearly 30 years in the same neighborhood is a bit jolting, but downsizing to a single story for our future retirement makes sense as well.  We can be picky, since we don't HAVE to move, and, as we live in Southern California, house prices are crazy high--we've seen 50-60 year old houses listed in the $400-500 per square foot range.  We'll see what happens...meanwhile, there is the safety and surety of fabric to cut and sew--or unsew, as the case may be!