disappearing friendship block

The first block tutorial for the Block Party QA was up earlier this week, so I made a friendship star block using some of the fabric from my Christmas-quilt-in-progress, thinking it would be fun to incorporate it into the back.

Then I started thinking about this block, and wondered what would happen if I quartered the friendship star.  Fun ensued!  So many choices.

How about just sashing in between?

Not sure what to call this one:

I tried some other arrangements (note to self, when basement is finished, get a design wall up...my cutting mat on the floor isn't so inspiring)--boats?  birds?--but finally settled on this one,

which I love because of the mini-star in the middle, and also because I think that a quilt with staggered rows of this block would look so cool--the quarter stars matched up with others in contrasting fabrics.

For some reason, I'm really into this quartering thing, or rather, into cutting and rearranging blocks.  Next up, I think I'll make a couple of other traditional blocks for quartering...maybe in some of the other fabrics from the Christmas quilt--might as well have a use for my experiment.

If you haven't heard about the Block Party blog and (companion flickr group) that inspired all of this, take a second to check it out.  What started as a virtual quilting bee has grown into a book deal for the admins, a quarterly quilt-along for anyone and everyone, and the flickr group...which has inspired a bunch of new bees, including mine!  I've been wanting to join one for a long time, but they seem to fill up so fast!  With so many interested people in one place, the flickr group was the perfect opportunity to start a new one.  The Bee's Knees is up and running, with a start date of January.  So excited!