Quilt of Valor challenge

It was red/white/blue around here yesterday.

I had a repair guy here working on my dishwasher in the morning, which kept me upstairs. So I trimmed 4 Quilts of Valor that came back from the long armer, and did some paperwork on the quilts awarded recently.  Then I played with a few RWB blocks - in the limited amount of actual sewing time I had after he left.    

At Sew Vintage we decided we would do occasional "block challenge" projects.  Members will take turns providing a pattern for a 12" finished block to the group, and challenge us to make the block.  In some cases we will collect the blocks to make a special project.

This month's challenge was given by Louise, and it came in a pizza box given to each of us.  We're a small group of 12, so she got that many new empty boxes.  Inside each box she taped a cute vintage card on the cover, and there was a block pattern.  This block was the free pattern for Quilts of Valor Foundation's 2019 block drive.  Our QOV group has used this pattern for several quilts.  It's a favorite!! 

Louise asked us to make the block in patriotic colors, and her plan is to donate the blocks to our Quilt of Valor group.  It's a floating Ohio Star block, and very forgiving when being sewn by a group.  Her sample block had a print center inside the star instead of making the star all white.  So when I went home I cut the parts to make mine similar to hers, using a flag print for the star center. 

Here is my finished Floating Star block for the challenge.  It's now tucked back into the pizza box to return to Sew Vintage in March.  I think I'm going to make another one using a red background - just because.
 

While I had that chunk of flag print out, I decided to use it to make a couple more of this year's QOV block drive pattern, called Echoes.  There are 8 of these in my stack so far.  The QOV site shows the Echoes blocks used around panels, but it will make a nice quilt no matter how we use them.  These are 9" finished blocks. I've included the link to this free pattern.
https://www.qovf.org/in-the-news/echoes-named-as-quilts-of-valor-foundation-block-of-2026/

I also made a paper pieced block from the Moda Blockheads 5 series.  We used this block in a past QOV sampler and it turned out perfectly, but this time my block was only 11.5" instead of 12.5".  I think I printed my foundation papers slightly undersized.  So - after taking this photo, I added a 1.5" red strip to the 2 red sides of the block. It will look OK in a sampler.  On a side note - that pile of pieces to the left are the WASTE cut from the block as I trimmed each section.  That is a lot of wasted fabric, but I'll use those scraps in some smaller blocks.