SAHRR 24 Border 5

Today’s border for the Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR) is brought to you by the prompt from Quilting Gail, who put this whole quilt along together, with lots of prompting input from her quilting friends. Her prompt is “4.” Anything we want as long as it somehow relates to 4.

I had been thinking for awhile of doing something with piano keys and did a mock-up of a design, but it seemed to overwhelm the rest of the quilt. (The keys would have been 2 by 4 inches.) Not wishing to abandon the idea completely, I settled on a row of 2-inch squares. To get the element of 4 in, I separated groups of 4 colorful squares with a white square. I needed something as a buffer between the current border and the last one, so I used the little print that I used on the first border. It’s 2 inches wide, so at this point the border is 4 inches wide.

Now this may have seemed a simple process. But on Tuesday I felt a cold coming on. Sensing that it was only going to get worse, I worked like crazy to get this made before I wouldn’t feel like it. The borders went on easily, but I still had to figure out the corner. (I left a bit of the seam open, so I could add the corner block in.) By yesterday, my cold had hit hard, but I was determined to finish this up. I had some ideas for the corner, including a four patch and several versions of the signature block I had made in Border 1. I spent several hours moving fabric around and photographing to see what it would look like. (Sorry, I'm too tired to organize them to show here.) I was still bothered by the light gray print and how it was kind of low contrast with my other prints, but anything darker jumped out too much. So in the end I chose a block that echoed the one in the upper left corner of the quilt. It only took another hour to put it together (yes, you read that right). I had to make an HST patch twice because of errors in sizing and trimming. Clearly I should not have been trusted with even the simplest sewing. 

I had one more element I wanted to add. My original plan with this quilt was to make 6-inch borders, and I wanted to add more of the black and white floral to bring the border to at least that size. I had some strips that I could use that were actually wide enough to make a 4-inch border. Given the prompt for this week, I thought that was neat. But I ran out of steam before I could make the border. It would have required piecing together three pieces of fabric for one of the sides and then sewing two long seams to attach the borders. Overwhelming, and I was really worried that with my foggy thinking, I’d ruin it. So here’s a preview of how it will look when I get my energy back. I’m giving myself some sewing time off, so I can recover enough to finish up Border 6 next week.

Be sure to go to the Linky Party at Gail’s website to see how the other SAHRR quilts are coming along. I’ll go, too. It seems like the perfect couch activity while I kick this cold to the curb.

(Just a reminder: I'm not affiliated with any company, so when I mention products, services, or stores, I'm just documenting what I used or liked.)