WIP Wednesday: The Pointy Edition

I have been hard at work on my fourth block for my Sew. Happy. Quilt. this evening. Jenna suggested spray starch in her tutorial and I decided to give it a go. I'd asked my quilting instructor during class last week about spray starch in general and she said she only used it occasionally and that it was particularly useful when you have a lot of cuts on the bias.  All I can say is I wish I'd heard of spray starch sooner. This stuff is all kinds of awesome! Having stiffer pieces enabled me to be more accurate as evidenced by the centre of my Pinwheel Block:

I didn't say it was perfect, but it's pretty damn good!

Here's the block in it's entirety:

I enjoyed making this block, but there's a step in the tutorial which I feel shouldn't be necessary. After piecing the quarters (i.e. the three triangles) you need to trim the squares down to 6.5 inches. I feel like there should be a way to cut your original pieces to eliminate this step. The instructions in my sampler class for the churndash block had us cut squares that were 4 and 7/8 inches for our HSTs in order to end up with 4.5 inch squares. I'm hoping that when we do the pinwheel-type block in class I'll learn the measurements to use so that I don't have to do any trimming in the future because it's just annoying and takes extra time. If anyone has suggestions on this, please leave them in the comments!

Last night I finished the other block of the week for the Sew. Happy. Quilt., the Friendship Star. I fussy cut the centre flower and I'm not 100% sold on it, but I don't actively dislike it so it's staying as is.

Here are all four blocks to date for this QAL. This quilt is coming along fabulously, if I do say so myself (and I do!).

I'm off to select fabrics for tomorrow night's class. We're making a Log Cabin block and a Nine Patch. Yay!

WIP status report
Farmer's Wife QAL - four blocks completed
Sew. Happy. Quilt. QAL - four blocks completed
We Bee Learning Bee - Hayley's block and my siggy block are in the mail
Sampler Quilt class @ The Workroom - Frog Prince Churndash completed
Wonky Log Cabin Placemats - no progress, still one block to go
Levi's Growth Chart - no progress, still need to embroider his height, but otherwise complete
Levi's Bed Quilt - on hold until I settle on a pattern

As usual, I'm linking up with WIP Wednesday on Freshly Pieced.