Delectable Borders
I cleaned and organized my sewing area before I left on my travels. That’s a habit I need to maintain. Being able to walk in and either pick up where I left off on something or start something new without getting distracted is huge.
One of my fabric purchases last week was a fat quarter bundle of some fabric I hadn’t seen before. It is the Wild Spirit collection from Daphne Brissonet for Camelot Fabrics. The Quilting Bee had made up only one fat quarter bundle for sale, but bolts of the yardage were on the shelf. Unfortunately, this line only has half a dozen fabrics in it. That’s not really enough variety for the kind of quilts I like to make. I bought the fat quarter bundle anyway and decided I would supplement from my stash when I got home (reason #351 for having a large fabric stash), so yesterday morning, I pulled a half dozen coordinating prints and started cutting. I am making another Framed quilt. So far, I have four blocks done and I love the way it looks.
And I spent a couple of hours working on that commission quilt top. The center is done, as are the first two borders. Three borders remain, two of which are pieced from Delectable Mountains blocks. I made all the half-rectangle triangles—88 of them—before I left.
Piecing this border was slow going even though I’ve made these blocks before. I have no room for error (read: no extra fabric to fix mistakes), so I set up a system. I cut one rectangle into four strips, turned them around into the proper arrangement, and took those strips to the sewing machine. I sewed one pair of strips together followed by the second pair. Then I got up, went back to the cutting table, and cut a second rectangle. I took those four strips back to the machine, sewed the first pair together, clipped the first two pairs from the chain and sewed them together to make a completed block, then sewed the second pair of the second rectangle together. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s not very efficient because I have to keep getting up and down, but that’s not a bad thing. I needed five of each block orientation, and once all 10 blocks were done, I sewed them together in pairs to make the border.
Here is where it gets tricky. The temptation is great to sew the border to the edge of the quilt and whack off any excess length to even up the two pieces. If you do that repeatedly over several borders, though, you may very well end up with 1) wavy edges; 2) an out-of-square quilt top; or 3) both. The correct method is to measure through the center of the quilt top and use that measurement for the length of the borders. The pattern accounts for this by noting that some fudging of the pieced Delectable Mountains block border may be necessary.
The center of my quilt measured 70”. The sides where I needed to attach the border actually measured about 72” due to the stretching that tends to happen during quilt construction. The first pieced border measured 69”.
[It’s a good habit to cut solid fabric borders from the lengthwise grain of the fabric to minimize stretching. Fabric stretches more across than it does up and down. The pattern indicated to cut those borders across the width of the fabric, though, and because I didn’t have any wiggle room in the form of extra fabric, I followed the pattern instructions.]
It is possible to ease together two strips of uneven length by taking advantage of the way the feed dogs move on the sewing machine. The fabric on the bottom actually feeds a bit faster than the fabric on top. Obviously, the longer the strips, the more distance you have over which to ease in the difference, but I thought easing in 3” over about five feet was asking a bit much. I let out a few of the seams on the pieced border—a fix suggested in the pattern—to make the pieced border measure 70”. By sewing with the slightly longer quilt border on the bottom and the pieced border on top, the two fabrics went together perfectly.
The second border went on the same way.
I’ve now got to make the top and bottom pieces and attach them. Two borders will remain after that. The next border is much simpler. It consists of 5-1/2” wide pieces of focus fabric (the sled dogs) and no piecing. The final border is another Delectable Mountains block border. Slow and steady wins the race. Hopefully, I can have this top done in another week or so. I’ve enjoyed working on it but I’d like to get it back to Jan so it can be quilted and bound.