Never fear! This story does have a happy ending!

But yesterday I was not feeling happy, I was having difficulty truly enjoying the process of creating and attaching the borders to my Spider Webs & Stars quilt. This section of the quilt top was definitely being designed and made ‘on the hoof’. There were so many decisions to be made by my naturally cautious, prevaricating self!

Scrappy rectangles cut ready to stitch into piano-key border sections.

I began by stitching rectangular scraps together to create piano-key style borders. These were to be interspersed with 4½” square-in-a-square units. I’d made these a few days earlier with the idea they’d carry the star shaped sections into the border while the scrappy piano keys would be an echo of the strips of fabrics used to in the Spider Web sections of the quilt top.

Quilt math went out the window as I attached the trimmed piano key strips along with the square-in-a-square units along the outside edges of the quilt. However much I measured before calculating or calculated before measuring I just couldn’t get a consistent length for the strips. In the end I lay the quilt flat on the floor, lined up square-in-a-square units with the star points before measuring and then cutting the piano-key strips to size. All the while worrying this seemingly haphazard method of creating a border would lead to wavy, uneven borders 😱

Before all the borders were attached to the quilt top I’d changed my mind about an outside border. I had been planning to use blue fabrics for the binding so as to create a blue frame around the piano key border. But as I worked away I decided it would be better to create an actual outer border of blue fabrics. As well as being more balanced in look (the binding would have been much narrower than the inner blue border) an outer border would close up all those exposed seam ends in the piano-key border. Hey!Ho! More scrabbling through scrap bags and stash to find blue fabrics; more crawling around on the floor measuring and pinning; more long seams to stitch!

The inner and outer blue borders frame the scrappy piano-key border

And the hours were slipping by! Luckily it was a wet bank holiday but even so I hadn’t bargained on spending so many hours bobbing up and down from the floor to my sewing machine and then trotting backwards and forwards to the ironing board set up in the sitting room. I knew I had to stay focussed to push this patchwork through to the end of the piecing process and prepare it for quilting. But it was hard for me not to notice the growing mess in my sewing room. In fact I felt quite hemmed-in and that feeling only got worse as the piecing finally ended only to be followed by, what on this particular day felt like a real trial, choosing and making the pieced backing 😕 More fabric bins pulled from shelves, more disruption as sofas were pushed back against the sitting room wall to make floor space to cut the wadding and audition the backing fabrics. More crawling on the floor (oh! my dodgy right knee!); more trotting up and down the hall between sewing machine and ironing board!

The pieced backing – at last!

Nope! I couldn’t honestly say I enjoyed the process but I was pleased to have stuck with it in order to complete the quilt top and piece the backing. Have you had similar experiences during the making of a patchwork quilt – when you are pushing through from one stage in the process to the next?

All three layers together, ready for basting.

Phew! Today there has been time to re-group after a reasonable nights sleep. First job, clean and tidy the sewing room. I so enjoyed doing this along with half a dozen of the little tasks I had had to diligently ignore yesterday; including changing the blade in my rotary cutter; removing the needle plate of my machine to give the bobbin race a much needed de-fluff; sorting and filing an accumulation of paperwork; and re-locating some furnishings and WIPs which were adding to that hemmed-in feeling I’d been experiencing.

Now, the environment’s right for me to think creatively, rediscover the joys to be found in the processes of patchwork-quilting and, no doubt, make another fine mess 🙂

Here’s to happy endings!

Allison