How Big is Big?

This is the finished QUILTS OF VALOR panel. It is 19" tall by 108" (9 feet) wide. It's designed to fill the back of a ten foot wide show booth.  It was also designed to grab your attention, which is pretty easy to do when the letters are ten and twelve inches tall.

My cat Millie, however, remains unimpressed.

For those who do not know, the only patchwork I make is free pieced, which means these letters were made without patterns or templates and these letters are NOT paper-pieced.

Quilts

The letters U-I-L-T-S are 10" tall. Looking at it now I should have left more space between the I and the L.  I haven't sewn the Q to the rest yet.

Speaking of the Q, I hate when this happens:

This is what I have so far, and I am pleased with it:

Valor

I was asked to make a banner for the local QOV group. Usually I start with the first letter in the phrase, but this time I had something special planned, so I stared with the V. What was the something special? I wanted to use serifs.  Here is the finished word.

The serifs are the little extra bits you see above on the V, A, L and R. The top right arm of the V will have a serif later. I'll add it when I create the top border.

The other special element I had planned was to use a five pointed star as the negative space in the O.  So how do you make a five pointed star without paper piecing?  With a lot of forethought. Here is how I did it.

I made three points of the star and surrounded two with the background red fabric on two sides. One of the triangles only needed the background fabric on one side.

The points were sewn around a white triangle. The (seriously) cool thing about sewing this five pointed star together is that I didn't have to sew into corners. It wasn't hard, but it was tricky.

My star isn't 100% perfect, but it's damn close and from a few feet away you can't even tell.