Use It Up Challenge…..FINALLY….

When we last left this challenge, it looked like this…..

I quickly finished the 2-1/2 inch square border but there it sat while we traveled and I caught up with my accounting work.

This week I have had some time to work on the project again with the first step being piecing the piano key border.   The first problem was that I didn’t have enough keys cut to finish the border, so I had to do some fancy piecing…..

….and some of the seams got REALLY small…..

Even after all of my fancy piecing, I was still a few inches short but added a little bit of two new fabrics to allow enough for the border.   Having said that, there was not enough to make a full border so I ended up having to add corner squares….

At this point,the piano key border was 3.5 inches wide.

Now is where the rub comes in…..   I still had some tiny slivers of fabric left so decided that I would put them together to make a new fabric to be used somewhere in the quilt.

I took a base fabric, covered it will fusible web and started laying out strips of the left over fabrics…..

After ironing it down, I pulled out some fun threads…..

….and attached the fabrics….

My thinking is that I would make circles that could sit in the cornerstone squares and they turned out looking great…..

Then came the new design opportunity (ie…mistake).  As I was attaching the first piano key border, I decided that it would look better if it was smaller….a LOT smaller.  So, I grabbed the rotary cutter and whacked off almost half of the border.   It looked a lot better, but then I realized that I had now made the border so small that the perfectly formed circles would not fit anymore…..ARGH!!!!

Since there wasn’t much that I could do to fix it, I decided to go ahead and attach the final border and then figure out what the quilt needed.    At this point, I had these leftover strips from the wrongly-cut border….

I was really wanting to have circles somewhere in the outer borders to continue the theme from the center of the quilt.  As I looked at these pieces, I realized that some of them were big enough to cut a 1 inch circle out of…….

Then came the agonizing decision of exactly what I was going to do with these perfect circles.   I started out thinking that I would put the circles all along the outer border…..

I also considered a tiny, tiny strip of mini keys in the middle of the border (see the bottom one) but quickly canned that idea.

By now, I was tired of trying to come up with ideas so I called down to Michael and asked him to come up and have a look.   He really liked the circles in the borders but commented that it should be asymmetrical and not have circles all around the piece. 

BINGO….that was exactly what I was thinking in the back of my mind, but it hadn’t made it to the front of my mind yet!!!

Thus, with help from the Hubby, the top was finished…..