Friday, October 08, 2010

Tessellating borders

I'm late posting today because I wanted to get my borders on and show you. It took longer than I thought it would.

So. Now my Tessellating Cats quilt is an official flimsy. I have embroidery to do but this is as large as it is going to get.

I am very happy with my colorful borders and I'm sort of proud of myself for figuring out a way to make them. I am not too inventive so this is actually an idea from someplace way back when that just stayed snuggled in the back of my mind. The actual Tessellating Cats pattern called for using a striped fabric (which I did not have and did not want to go looking for). I figured I had enough fabric to piece together my own striped fabric in a piano key fashion.

I HAVE another quilt with a piano key border so I wanted to try something new... In accord with the tessellating I decided black and colored triangles pulled the quilt together better and then began designing. What size triangles? How wide a border?

Do you know what this is? I decided on a three inch border. I drew out a template on paper. Then I layered 8 or 10 pieces of paper together (I forget exactly) and machine SEWED over the lines I'd drawn with an unthreaded needle. This gave me 8 or 10 punched-out patterns of my triangles and I did this two or three times... I ended up needing 24 strips of paper for my border and then I was ready to paper piece!

Paper piecing was done as one normally does but instead of following a printed line I followed the needle punches. I used 2 1/2 inch strips in alternate black and colors and trimmed as I went along. When I'd get to the end of one paper I'd pin a new one to the end and continue using my strips. That was all done by yesterday (but it was still a two week long process...) And today I put in corners (that took some figuring too...) and sewed the borders to the cats. The edges are reinforced one more time and then the paper removed from the back.

Next step is to embroider some faces onto those cats. More in front of the TV work.
Colorful is right!

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