What I'm currently working on...

I have posted pictures of the Underground Railroad blocks I worked on over the past year.


The quilt blocks are now all sewn together with the sashing. I wanted to put a border around the outside and had planned on doing 2 plain borders. When I started planning out the border, I decided that this quilt deserved some more exciting borders. So I decided to try a pieced border (insert ominous music and thunder claps here). I know how important good borders are but I have a tendency to just slap on plain old borders and call it done, so this is a challenge for me. I'd seen a ribbon border in one of the quilts from Elm Creek Quilts that I thought would look good. Judy has a similar border (except more colorful than mine) in the quilt in her post about deciding whether you need odd or even blocks in borders. This is the first time I've added my own pieced borders to a quilt.

I laid the quilt out in EQ with blank blocks and used a Y block to make the border. The problem was that EQ wouldn't let me have more than 24 blocks on one side of my border. I don't know why but the little drop down only went to 24 and it wouldn't let me type in the field. You might be able to see in the image below that the blocks on the long sides are not square. This meant that I couldn't print out correct measurements and cutting instructions for the borders. I finally just adjusted the size of the block when I printed out the cutting instructions for the block.


I added some "floaters" around the outside the quilt to make it the right size to use 3 inch blocks in the border and to make the ribbon look like it was kind of floating in the border. I've got all the blocks made and just need to finish squaring them up and sew them together. Hopefully all my math was correct and the borders will fit!

I'm working on a few Christmas gifts right now, but hopefully I'll get back to this before the end of the year...End of the year! What happened to August?!?!