Color choices again

In my new year to-do list was another swipe at the Carol Doak paper pieced star patterns. I decided to use this fun polka dot black fabric as the background for several that will become ... well, I don't know how big a quilt. Maybe it will be 16 blocks [they're 12x12] with stripping. Or maybe it will grow to 20 blocks. It partly depends on whether I have enough of the background fabric.
I seem to be very much in a black and red period the last year or so. These blocks will be predominantly shades of red with other colors as seems right. Color has been my bugaboo ever since I started doing the quilts from her Fifty Fabulous Stars book. I consider it a good exercise in understanding what works and what doesn't.
Some of these four stars have had other iterations -- well, just a quarter not the whole thing. The problem seems to be that when fabrics are spread out for consideration the variations in tone [or is it hue?] seem marked and dramatic. But when I sew them into these relatively small bits, all kind of bunched together in the middle of the star they blend rather than contrast. I love the fact that fabrics blend in quilts, it's one of my favorite things about quilting. But in these stars I want a different effect and I have a lot of difficulty deciding which fabric to use.
This is not exactly the start of something big, but definitely it will grow bigger. Just half a square at a time while I work on other slow projects as well, approaching them in the same piece by piece manner.

OH, my gosh! I just looked at these pictures, despite having had these squares pinned to my design wall, I see the light yellowish diamonds in the top star are wrongly placed in three out of eight instances. Will I redo it? You gotta be kidding. It is said that the Amish quilters used to deliberately sew in a mistake so as not to challenge God's perfection. And I've always said God's got nothing to worry about from me; I can make imperfections without even knowing it.