Veterans Day Stitching

Today is bright and blustery in New Jersey, and temperatures have been falling a surprising amount.  I need no further excuse to stay inside and sew all day.  Rather than selfish sewing today, I am piecing some blocks to honor our veterans.  They will be put together into a Quilt of Valor for my local group.  (My current client quilt is patiently waiting for a new ruler to arrive.)
I started with the Catch a Falling Star pattern from Kristy Lea.  I love the five pointed star.  It was published in Make Modern magazine.  You can purchase it from Craftsy.   It is a foundation paper piecing pattern, so I printed up 10 sets of blocks.  The blocks finish at 10″.
I pulled fabrics in red, white and blue from my bins.  I have several prints with stars, which pleases me.  Quilts of Valor do not need to be red, white and blue, but that is what I feel like making today.
This pattern is pretty simple, but paper piecing still gives me a hard time sometimes.  I frequently find myself stitching first with really big stitches, making sure my piece covers the whole space, then stitching the seam again with little stitches.  Picking out the tiny stitches is just too miserable.
Here are the four I did before lunch time.  I’ll spend the afternoon finishing off the rest of the pieces I printed up.  Hopefully 10 blocks will be enough for a top, when combined with sashing and borders.  Quilts of Valor requires finished quilts to be a minimum of 55″ x 65″.
I haven’t decided if I will just make a pile of blocks and turn them over to our group, or shoot for a finished quilt. My plate is pretty full right now, so I am leaning towards just giving the finished blocks to the group and see what they do with them.  They could be interesting signature blocks.
If you haven’t looked into Quilts of Valor, please look at their website.  You can donate quilt blocks, tops, longarming, entire quilts, or everyone’s favorite – money.  They are an interesting organization.   Being able to volunteer with a program that uses my quilting skills is very fulfilling.  Plus, the quilters I work with are wonderful people.   I was told this week that I’ve quilted 10 quilts for them this year already!  I haven’t been keeping track, but now I feel pretty pleased with myself.