Adding Some Breathing Room to a Quilt

I basted some quilts this week, but I am going to have to take one of them out and re-do it. Several years ago, I bought a bag at a yard sale containing the pieces for a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt. Some 40+ hexie flowers had been completed. A few of them had been sewn together with white background hexies. However, the white background hexies were made up of different fabrics—many of them dirty or stained—so I decided to liberate the hexie flowers from the background hexies and appliqué them to white background squares instead. I ended up with 42 squares in a 6 x 7 straight setting.

I did not put a border on the quilt. I have mixed feelings about borders. Sometimes I think they get used as an excuse to make the quilt bigger rather than as a necessary design element. However, they have a practical use, too.

This is the quilt laid out and pin basted:

I think the quilt looks fine without a border. I like the flowers floating on the white background. However, as the quilt top gets quilted, the fabric will shrink and shift. Those outside edges will become distorted. They can be trimmed and squared up, but only if there is sufficient extra fabric at those edges. On this quilt, there isn’t. I risk trimming off some of the flowers. That potential problem didn’t occur to me until I had finished basting this one.

The border wouldn’t have to be wide. A 2” white border added to each side would provide sufficient breathing room. I could add the borders fairly easily, even without taking the whole thing apart, but I am not sure that would leave enough overhang for the batting and backing. The backing and batting have to be at least a couple of inches larger on each side than the quilt top. If I add borders and discover that the backing and batting are too small, I’ll have to take the whole thing apart and put it back together with a bigger backing and batting.

For now, the quilt is rolled up in the spare bedroom. When I have some time, I will lay it out on the floor and reassess. I wish I had thought this through more carefully while I was basting this one, but I got into production mode and wanted to finish.

The Churn Dash and Blue Thistle quilts are also basted and ready to quilt. Do I have any idea when I will have time to quilt them? I do not. The next couple of weeks—and most of April, really—are chock full of other things needing attention. And I have to make a set of cushion covers.

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The 2022 gardening season is officially underway:

Being out in the greenhouse at this time of year is not a hardship. Planting seeds is not difficult. Most of us end up with way too many seedlings anyway, which was part of the motivation for having a plant sale.

On Wednesday, I planted a few varieties of tomatoes, some peppers, some flowers, and some herbs. Today, I’ll do more tomatoes, the corn, and the squash and cukes. I am trying to plant many different things so we have lots to offer at the plant sale in May. And other people in the community will be contributing plants to the sale that they have started or dug up from their own gardens.

The husband and I had drinks on the veranda yesterday afternoon and discussed our upcoming projects. Everything is prefaced with “After the auction . . .” The fire department fundraising auction is next weekend, and while it’s going to help raise money for the new fire station, it’s the kind of event that requires that we shove everything else aside until it’s over. He and I are in charge of the equipment sale this year. This is a new job for me. I understand—in theory—how it is supposed to go, but it’s still unfamiliar and a fairly steep learning curve.

Once the auction is over, though, we’ll be able to get chicks and concentrate on the infrastructure projects that need to be done around here.