Got the borders on today. Ended up making all sorts of last minute judgment calls that changed my original plans. Even with the extra fabric order, I ultimately didn't have enough fabric to do the directional borders the way I wanted to (with all the peace signs heading in the same direction and no seams interrupting the flow). That meant I no longer really had to do mitered corners--in fact, I decided they probably would look better without since I'd never have gotten the peace sign blocks to line up well anyway. So I just did a much simpler border.
Still had to reverse-sew--aka seam rip--my inner (black) border due to some bad advice. I had read somewhere--don't recall where now--that using a walking foot/acu-feed for piecing would also help keep fabrics lined up well as you were sewing. Not so much. They were fine along the line of the seam but got smudged out of whack horizontally--in other words, one piece of fabric got pushed further away from the sewing line than the other. I'd even pinned! So I ripped it back out and changed back to my regular 1/4" presser foot and had a grand old time.
I just finished sewing about a 1/4" (slightly wider) echo quilt line around the entire peace sign. My original plan was to do that once, and then do a diamond grid for the rest of the background. But as I'm looking at it, I think I'll just keep doing the echo. The grid would never line up straight with the two diagonal bars on the peace sign so I'm better off not messing with it.
I'll finish the quilting tomorrow, get the bindings on Monday, good to go for show n' tell at my guild on Tuesday--and in the mail by Wednesday or Thursday (whenver I finish hand-sewing the binding). Yippee!
Oh--and no worries. The extra fabric went to good use. It now has a pieced backing with the one coordinating fabric I'd bought that I'd originally thought would make an interesting binding (nope--too busy), surrounded by the leftover peace sign fabric divided into two strips. Bingo--none left over!
Sandy's blog on quilting, life, and sundry.
