The challenge for January at my guild, Valley MQG, is to use Pantone color of the year, ultraviolet. That means, pulling out all of my purple fabrics, turns out I have quite a few.
Purple is a very hard color to work with. Some love it, others hate it. I find that blues, greens or reds, all play nicely with one another, but the difference between a blue-purple or a red-purple can be jarring. I’m up for the challenge.
Now that I have the Lemoyne Star ruler, it should be easier to make these stars. I’m still trying to figure out the size. I thought this was going to be a 12.5″ block, it’s more like an 11.5″. 
Tilting the star changes the block size.
At this point, I’m still playing. Needless to say, I won’t be making a pillow, or a small project, this will become a quilt. I decided to make it medallion style. I found a feather star pattern I like.
Unfortunately, it is paper piecing and I wasn’t in the mood. So I tried to adapt to piecing, using the paper piece pattern and adding seams.
It worked ok. As you can see, the complementary color of purple is yellow. This background has a lot of green in it, although it didn’t photograph that way. I worked along and it wasn’t going all that well.
The pattern is available for 12″ and 18″. I am using the 18″, except by accident I used the 12″ center. then there were problems with the corners….
Halfway through I switched to paper piecing after all.
Combing both my pieced and paper-pieced sections, I put the star together!
Now, to start building up the medallion. I like quilts to be used, therefore it is much better if they are rectangles. So right off the bat, I start elongating the block. I had a lot of fun figuring out the first border. Now to incorporate those first stars into subsequent borders as well, and to share what I’ve done so far with the guild.
Leah