WIP Wednesday - Designing Paper Pieced Stars

Seeing as I won't make the deadline for the triangle-a-long this weekend, I figured, as it's a Bank Holiday here this weekend, to try and make some headway on my baby Medallion quilt.  The last round planned for this are some stars and 4 hearts in the corners.  The whole design when finished should look like this:

Yes, it's very busy and I hope very colourful. I'm not even sure how to begin toning it down if I ever wanted to!

I scaled up the 3" hearts in the inner border to 4" and 6" for the last two borders. I've been playing with star shapes trying to figure out what will work best for the quilt.  The last border will be 6" and my original design above had a fat star with 6 points.  There are lots of ways to make a 6 pointed star, EPP diamonds, piecing with triangles or inset seams but to try it out quickly I decided to paper piece. 

After a bit of trial and error I came up with a fat 6 pointed star and a skinnier 5 pointed star using both Quilt Assistant and EQ7 which now runs on my old Macbook.

Paper piecing was quick and I think I can get 2 stars from each 10" layer cake so not too wasteful of fabric.  The fabric I'm using for the Stars is a layer cake from Me and My Sister with Kona snow for the background.

With only a few seams it went together very quickly and what's great about paper piecing is all the points are protected, especially nice when making star shapes!

 So now I've got 2 stars made, I need to make a decision.

I'm leaning towards the second one on the bottom.  I'm hoping when pieced together they will make a lovely chain around the quilt to finish it off.  What do you guys think?  There'll be 40 stars in total so 39 more to go!

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