Stars and square self-challenge update

For the Memorial day weekend what could be better than an update to the red white & blue knitted afghan square self challenge?

Blogger doesn't speak pdf so II can't readily share the drawings that I'm trying to reproduce in knitting but I'll get the images up to my web page at some point and provide links to the two most interesting plans.

The basic idea is to mix centre out polygons with perimeter in polygons or to mix centre outs with either grafting or three needle bind offs.

In the photo to the left there are five geometric pentagons with eight stitches on a side.

The pentagon sides were then extended with short rows. Unfortunately, at this size, the stars measured six inches at the widest point and that's too big for the particular constraints.

So I frogged each one back to six stitches on a side.

My first idea was to use Russian grafting to join a white star to a blue centre out pentagon. It worked but it wasn't pretty.

The second idea was the in and out mix and that's shown in the photo at right.

Each of the five blue pentagons have been knitted from the perimeter in starting with a mix of the live stitches from the adjoining white stars and stitches picked up from the selvedge stitches of the stars.

The whole ring now measures about 10 inches across which is perfect for the 12 inch square.

For the centre I'm trying to decide whether I want to do a red perimeter in pentagon (geometric or swirl) or a centre out.

The serious challenge will, of course, be taking the polygon formed by the merger of the stars and pentagons into a square.

For the moment, all the live stitches are sitting on waste yarn while I consider the options.