Tuning the border!!

Earlier this year, my friend Diane passed after a short battle with cancer. It was heartbreaking to lose such a creative soul and friend.

Diane was one of those women who rose early and I could be sure that she would post a comment on my blog just after it was published at 5:30 AM.

5:30 AM friends are always the best!!

At her memorial service, I was told that Diane had asked if I would finish the quilt that she had started. Of course, I was honored to be asked!!!

She was in the middle of a sampler quilt utilizing lots of fun fabrics. This was how it looked on her design wall…..

My first thought was to add the horizontal sashing…..

….but it needed something else!

Fortunately, Sue (another friend) had gone to Diane’s studio and gathered all of the fabrics that were used in the top and I had those stacked on my cutting table.

The more that I thought about it, I KNEW that I needed to do something to pull all of those fabrics into the border and a PIANO KEY border was the way to go!!

After putting a bunch of strips together, I realized that it was going to be too wide for the top….

It was drawing all of the attention to the border rather than the blocks.

So, I carefully cut down all of the strip sets to 2.50-inches!!

(The good thing is that now have a 2-inch Piano Key Border ready to go for a future quilt!!)

I found one of the blue fabrics that had enough yardage to add a final border and now the top is complete….

I always love a Piano Key Border and this one did exactly what I wanted it to!!!

The top now travels to another friend (Sheila) who is going to quilt it. It will return to me for binding and then we will enjoy presenting it to her husband and daughter.

I mean…..isn’t that what quilters do for each other??

Fun Border Inspiration

This is another design from some random page of ideas that I printed off MANY years ago…..

…BUT…..wouldn’t this be a fun border pattern!!

It would be complicated to piece but might look REALLY good as a FMQ design!!! You could probably even use rulers!!

Now that I think about it, you could quilt it first and then paint it.

Something else to add to the list of “Things to try someday!!”

It’s Brown Border time…..

In my last post, I took you thru the creating of the inside of my Brown Scrap Strip quilt. As I mentioned there, I made WAY too many brown strip sets and was determined to not let any of them go to waste…..

So, it was imperative that the border contain as many of those strips as I could cram in. I started with laying them out end to end but that was just BORING!!!

Next I thought about the block design….

….noticing that the brown came to a point in each of the blocks.

HMMMM…wonder if I could emulate that in the border??? I made a few test blocks and decided that I had hit on the answer…..

I also made the decision to put a 2 inch background strip as the first border so that the striped border would float.

The only problem with this design was figuring out how long each of the strip sets needed to be to reach the edge of the quilt. TOO MUCH MATH…. So, I did the next best thing and decided to make them different sizes so I could “fudge” it to fit.

I would love to say that the process of making these border blocks was well thought out, the fabric sizes were properly calculated and cut. But, the truth of the matter is that I cut big, sewed and trimmed to size!!

I used the Essential Triangle Tool to cut the initial points and used my trusty painters tape to mark the edges of the strip so that the points were always in the middle of the strip…..

I love this measurement on one of my smaller rulers. It made trimming the point super easy.

To finish the top, I added another strip of background fabric to finish the “float”.

And at last the final seam was sewn…..

…and I was able to hang the finished top on the wall and step back to admire it…..

Of course the next question is how to quilt it….. but that decision can wait for a while….