SAHRR 24 Border 6

Tada! We are finished with our Stay at Home Round Robin (SAHRR) quilt tops, fun projects hosted by Quilting Gail and friends. This final prompt is from Kathleen of Kathleen McMusing: letters and numbers. So many ways to do this--fabric printed with those symbols, blocks that have some sort of shape in them that is a letter or number, actual pieced symbols, labels. Well, I have a confession to make. I already had an idea for this round, and I just needed to make it fit the prompt. Is that cheating? See what you think. 

I had some idea in mind that I wanted something curvy after all of the sharp angles. Specifically, scallops. Not sure exactly why, but anyway, that's what I wanted to do. A bit unexpected maybe, but I knew the colors would fit in with the rest of the quilt. At first I was a bit thrown when the prompt showed up on Monday. How was I going to link the prompt with my idea? I started thinking about abstract alphabet fonts and how they have just a suggestion of a letter. Let's see. Scallops along the bottom could be U's. Oh, that works. (Incidently, my family name before marriage starts with a U.) And then I thought the shapes along the right side could be backward C's. And then I saw a TV commercial for a movie out this week and noticed that the letters in the logo of the title were abstract letters, including D. Oh yeah, my shape is a D, not a backward C. Well okay then. And I was off cutting and sewing. 

Good thing I was feeling mostly better than I had in the last week or so, but I still had bit off maybe more than I could chew. So I just chewed really slowly. This took several days to do. I returned to some really old school designing and cutting. I drew my scallops on graph paper, added seam allowance and traced them out onto cardboard for templates. I added an extra 1/4 inch all around the outside edge to give myself enough trimming room. I traced around the templates with pencil and cut them out freehand using my rotary cutter. (Not quite old school with that last step. In the old days I would have used scissors.) I'm not sure I've ever made half-circle blocks before, but that didn't stop me. I had first thought of making 1/4-circles and seaming them, but that seemed like way to many seams. I just worked super slowly. The finished blocks were to be 2 by 4 inches, a little tight, but I got there. 

Remember I was thinking of a 4-inch border of the black and white print last week? I changed my mind in the end and made a three inch border instead. That way I didn't have to do any extra piecing (although one side already had a well-matched seam as it was the cut-away of a previous quilt backing). Then I surrounded the scallop border with 1-inch finished dotted borders, and ended with a floral border that finishes at 2 1/2 inches and echos the edge of the border in the first round. 

The top finished at 53-1/2 inches square, up from 44-1/2 inches last week. Now all I need to do is remove foundation paper from some of the blocks, give the top a good pressing, prewash and seam the backing, figure out how to quilt this whimsical little top (the hardest task for me in quilt-making), quilt it, and cut and sew the binding. We will be sharing our quilts the week of March 18. Think I can get it done by then? 

Thanks, Kathleen, for a prompt that I could fit into my vision for the last round. Oh, and in case my version of "letters or numbers" doesn't fly with you, I do plan to quilt my initials and date somewhere, which is my way of signing my quilts, so there's that. 

TIme to check out all the other tops at Kathleen's linky party. Meet me there, okay?