Thursday, 8 June 2006

I'm continuing to blog the history of Desert Star -- the history I should have been blogging as I went along, but didn't, because I'm lame. Check out the June 5 entry for a picture of the finished quilt.

After I finished the blocks and the sashing on the quilt, I had to think about the borders.

The fabric on the right is the fabric I purchased for the border. But outside in the sunshine, it just looked -- blah. If I had used it, it wouldn't have really added anything to the project, and it would have cried out for a lot of quilting, which I didn't want to (and really don't know how to) do. The fabric on the bottom is my favorite of all the fabrics used on this quilt (it appears in the green star in the picture above) -- but it didn't seem to fit with the somewhat formal feel of the tan background.

So, what to do? Ever since I started quilting, I've been enamored of little squares and rectangles. Postage stamp, Chinese coins, Split rail -- these are the patterns that make my heart race. After looking at the border options, I thought I needed something pieced (to reduce the quilting demands) and small (I didn't have a lot of time at this point in the project). I also had a *lot* of batik scraps, so I decided on a postage stamp border.

This struck both Lyn AND my friend B as utterly insane, given the time I had left to complete the project -- I had about 2 weeks left at this point. But it just seemed so right that I went ahead. I pieced sets of 10 strips -- each strip was 1x5 (finished) -- then cut them to 1.5 x 10.

Then flipped them all around to make the border look random and sewed them together.

This is where I came to my senses -- I would have liked to make the border 3 or 5 rows of postage stamps wide, but I just didn't have time for that.

So I settled for 2 rows of postage stamps around the outside of the stars. I really like the way this turned out, and I think it really makes the design work.