Baby Quilt Progress: Borders

I admit, I've been procrastinating on this one, even though it's my One Monthly Goal priority goal for August. I'm kind of winging it, figuring it out as I go along, and the borders had me a bit anxious. Thank goodness for deadlines! I couldn't put this off any longer. Voila, borders are on!

Because of the scale of the print, I didn't want to chop it up any more than necessary. I also wanted the animals to be right side up facing out around the edges, so I needed to miter the borders. I wanted the borders to be as wide as possible using the full WOF. So I looked carefully at the print repeat and cut 12" strips. I discovered that I had two pairs of matching prints: note the fox near the orange in the top & bottom border; he's near the turq in the side borders.

12" would be too wide to actually miter the corners, and would make the quilt too wide, so I trimmed the border strips down to about 10-1/2", keeping the most important elements of the print from being cut off too much. I attached the side borders, then the top & bottom, then mitered the corners. The borders were still too wide - I had nearly an inch beyond the miter seam - so I knew I needed to trim down the overall size.

By trimming the borders to 9", the corners came out okay and the overall size of the quilt is 41" square. I'm planning to use more of the focus fabric for the backing, and it's is 42" wide including the selvages, so I'm going to try to use it for the back without any piecing. Wish me luck!

This was trial and error all the way. It's probably the waviest and wonkiest but still square quilt top I've ever made. The piping (flange) around the center seems to have drawn up a little, and it certainly didn't make mitering the corners any easier, so I would not recommend it.

I hope it's true what they say, "It'll quilt out."  I'll quilt this one myself with meandering in the borders and small stipple and some straight lines in the blocks. I'll quilt more densely in the areas I need to shrink up a bit. Hopefully that'll make the whole thing lay flat. I'm going to have to pin this one pretty densely to avoid puckers.

I don't think baby and mom will be too picky about the quilting or any residual wonkiness. And I know mom will adore the cute Forest Fellows (Robert Kaufman) print.

Linking up with Sew Fresh Quilts and My Quilt Infatuation